As Long As There Are Stars
by Nomad1
Summary: Jed and Abbey history fic: sequel to 'So It Goes'.
1. I

**As Long As There Are Stars **  
by Nomad  
March 2003

**Spoilers:** Minor up to "Night Five".  
**Disclaimer:** Things I do not own: (1) Jed; (2) Abbey; (3) nearly enough period knowledge to justify tackling this story. Title comes from the Beach Boys song "God Only Knows".

* * *

** I **

"Hey." Ben prodded the other boy in the shoulder, and he came awake with a start.

"Oh, hey..." Jed sat up and stretched self-consciously. "I fell asleep?"

"No, you were a dynamic example of professional customer service." Ben cracked a grin. "Shop's closed, go home," he ordered, not unkindly.

Jed stood up, staggering a little. "Sorry, it's just..."

"Hitting the books all night?"

"Something like that." He sighed. "I've been trying to juggle my classes, but... I'm just not gonna be able to change my major how I want without basically scrapping a whole year of college."

His coworker frowned sympathetically. "So what're you gonna do?"

"Well, Dr. Weber thinks I should major in American Studies - I can do that with some of the classes I've got and still cram in some of the extra stuff - minor in theology, and then go on to do the economics for another separate degree."

Ben raised an eyebrow. "Whoa, you want to completely double your college time?" He shook his head. "Hey, your funeral."

"Hey, I _like_ college," Jed retorted. "But no, not at Notre Dame... Dr. Weber's talking about the London School of Economics."

He sucked in an admiring whistle that had only a faint patina of sarcasm. "London, England?"

Jed gave him a look. "No, Ben, London, Albania."

Ben thumped him lightly on the shoulder. "Well, hey, go for it, Jethro!"

"Don't call me that." Jed bit his lower lip. "I _want_ to, it's just..."

The older boy smiled knowingly. "Don't want to leave your girlfriend?"

Jed's head snapped up, startled, but he didn't actually deny the suggestion. Instead, he lowered his head again and sighed, scuffling his shoe against the floor. "We're not exactly... you know."

"Not exactly what?" Ben wondered, carrying a stack of books back to the counter. "Going at it like bunnies? 'Cause I've got to say, some of those steamy looks-"

"Dating," Jed said hurriedly, trying to contain his blush and not quite succeeding at it. "Not exactly dating."

Ben gave him a disbelieving look and sat down behind the counter, resting his chin on his folded arms. "I thought she kissed you?"

"She did. On the, on the lips."

He quirked a wry grin. "Well, if she'd kissed you anywhere else, I'd think you'd know that you were dating." He threw his hands up off Jed's glare. "Okay, okay! Seriously, man, she kissed you. I don't think it's an ambiguous signal."

"It was the night she broke up with Ron," Jed reminded him. "It was only a week ago. She needs... she needs time. I want to let her have some space."

Ben held his gaze for a long, impassive moment, then stood up, sighing explosively. "Jed? You're weird." He patted the younger boy on the shoulder. "Sweet... but weird." He steered him towards the door. "Now go on, get out of here. Get some sleep, get your head together... and for God's sake, ask that poor girl out before one or both of you explodes."

* * *

"Abigail? Are you all right in there?"

"I'm fine, mom."

Her daughter's voice was muffled, and Mary pushed open the door cautiously. Abbey was half crawled into her closet, looking for something.

"Now, what's all this banging and crashing going on in here?" she asked, with an affectionate pretence at sternness.

Abbey backed out clutching a leather-bound folder, and coughed as she brushed strands of hair from her face with the back of her hand. "I was looking for these."

"Well, it might help if you cleaned in here once in a while, young lady."

Abbey smiled briefly, but then gazed down at the photo album she'd retrieved with a troubled expression. "What am I supposed to do with these?" she wondered, sounding slightly lost. She flipped through a few pages, revealing photographs of her and Ron... Abbey's eighteenth birthday, Ron's sister's wedding, some random weekend hanging out in Ron's front yard...

"I believe burning in a trashcan is the traditionally favoured method," Mary offered. "Toasting marshmallows optional."

Abbey grinned quickly at that, then sighed and hugged her knees. "I don't... I it's not like I hate Ron or anything. I don't want to burn his pictures. It's not like we had a big fight or anything, we just..." She brushed dust from the binding of the photo album. "It's just... sad."

Mary smiled kindly at her daughter, and pulled her into a hug. "I know, honey. I know."

* * *

"So anyway, Dr. Tyler said- Jed, hello? Earth to Jed?"

"Excuse me, I gotta-" Jed barely registered his classmate's words as he suddenly spotted her across the road, coming out of the library with her friends. He quickly dashed across to join her, peripherally aware of the hum of slightly amused conversation that sprang up behind him.

"-girlfriend-"

"-dropped theology-"

"-girl with the-?"

This last query was delivered in a tone of faint bemusement that Jed could fully identify with. Him, Jed Bartlet, and this elegant, poised, stunningly beautiful girl? Surely not.

Surely not. And yet... She'd kissed him.

"Abbey!" He was a shade too out of breath when he reached her, and came out sounding perhaps a little too eager. She didn't seem to mind, turning and giving him a sunny smile.

"Jed." Her two friends eyed him more closely at this, and he wondered what she'd told them about him. And whether they were mentally comparing him to Ron Ehrlich, and considering staging some sort of intervention to set her down and ask her if she'd lost her mind.

"Hey," he said, shoving his hands a little nervously into his pockets.

"Hey," she replied, hugging her books against her chest.

The two girls exchanged a dry look. "We'll be at Kathy's house, if you want to come catch up with us."

"Or not."

Abbey made a vague 'mmm' sound, and didn't watch them go. She and Jed just grinned at each other for a moment, caught in a strange mix of awkwardness and comfortableness. Finally they both blurted words at the same time.

"I haven't seen you around for-"

"You haven't been-"

They both stopped, and she continued, with an apologetic smile. "You haven't been down at the bookstore much. Did you-?"

"Oh, I, uh, I traded shifts," he explained. "I've been down at the college at lot, trying to, uh, trying to get my courses sorted out."

"I thought you were doing economics," she frowned, sitting down beside him on the steps. He sat down too, and rubbed his face.

"So did I, but I've been talking to Dr. Weber, and there's just no way I can get all the classes I need without adding an extra year to my degree."

She put down her books. "So are you gonna do that now?"

He pulled a face. "I can't! My dad's already crazy at me for wanting to switch majors, God knows what he'd do if it turns out that I've wasted a year."

"So what are you gonna do?"

"I'm gonna major in American Studies, I guess, and keep the theology as a minor so I don't lose all the classes I've already taken." He fiddled with his fingers. "And maybe... maybe go on and do the economics after, somewhere else." He didn't know why he didn't mention London.

Abbey gave him a cautious smile. "I think you should do it."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah!" she insisted firmly. "You're so smart, you should be taking, like, fifteen degrees."

"I don't think I want to do that," he noted dryly.

"Oh, you so do," Abbey said pointedly. He raised his hands and shrugged, smiling.

"Okay, you caught me. I'm an incurable geek."

"It's all part of your charm." His cheeks reddened. "And so is that thing where you keep on blushing all the time."

He gritted his teeth, willing the blush to recede and not at all succeeding. "It's a curse."

"It's cute." His head shot up to look at her, startled, and she gave a slight shrug and a gentle smile.

This was probably a good point to tell her she was pretty cute herself. _Damn, damn, damn_... Blanking... Hopelessly blanking... What happened to those verbal SAT scores...?

_Way too long in silence, Jed. Do something. Do it now._

Aware of something rather like a drum beat in his ears that was possibly his pulse, he leaned forward, and kissed her.

Kissing girls, in a romantic manner, was not something he was used to. In fact, if you were going to get technical and restrict it to kisses directly on the lips where he was the initiator rather than the somewhat surprised kissee, it was safe to say it was pretty much brand new to him.

As new experiences went... he'd definitely tried worse.

He pulled back, and smiled tentatively. She smiled back, and took his hand. "You want to go get coffee or shakes or something?"

He blinked. "Okay."

And it turned out to be as simple as that.


	2. II

** II **

Dating; it was a whole new world.

Jed's romantic experience, prior to his now aborted decision to join the church, had been limited to the early teen version that seemed to mostly consist of hand-holding, possessive declarations and giggling in corners. An all-boys school under his father's eye had hardly been conducive to opportunities for girl-chasing, and to be honest he hadn't tried that hard. He'd never imagined there could be someone out there who was honestly right for him, so to have the perfect girl dumped unexpectedly in his lap was definitely a surprise.

Dating Abbey, then, was completely different to any relationship he'd found himself in before. There was no awkward shuffling of terminology and boundaries, anxious discussions over who'd done what and who'd said what and what it was supposed to mean. They just... were themselves. It was a scary, heady, wonderful feeling, like falling forward into the unknown.

He and Abbey had been spending time together for months, but now it was a conscious thing, an important thing. Even just hanging out together like they always had felt different. Whether they were watching a movie or killing time in the bookstore reference section, eating in a restaurant or arguing newspaper headlines over cookies in the kitchen, his heart would always jolt in exactly the same way.

And then there was the kissing. He was fairly positive that by this stage they were getting quite good at it, but still, they should probably practise as long and as often as possible, just to make sure.

His roommates and classmates might brag enthusiastically of their conquests and what base they'd got to with a random blonde they'd snagged the night before, but just being in the same _room_ as Abbey was enough to get his head swimming. Even if their current state of affairs just continued forever, he thought he'd be thanking God for it for the rest of his life.

Of course, forever had a nasty way of running out.

"I have to go home for spring break," he told her miserably, after it became increasingly clear that his tactic of ignoring it in the hope it wouldn't come was somewhat ineffectual. His father had ordered him home in no uncertain terms; apparently, Jed's shifting class roster and the shock news he'd acquired a girlfriend was enough to convince his father he was leading some hedonistic lifestyle of skipped classes and promiscuity.

Abbey offered a commiserating smile. She didn't know much about his relationship with his father, except that it was bad... but really, what else was there to know? "I wish I could go with you." She squeezed his hand.

Jed snorted faintly. "I don't think your parents would approve of that, somehow."

She snuggled closer against his shoulder. "Ah, they like you," she shrugged.

"Crazy people."

"Yeah." Abbey planted a little kiss on the side of his neck, which proved to be somewhat distracting. "When do you have go?" she mumbled into his shoulder.

"Too soon," he said, with feeling.

"Write me?"

"Every day," he promised, and meant it. "And I'll call, when I can." He buried his face against her hair, bereft at the thought of being deprived of this contact for days... weeks. "Maybe I can come back early."

It wasn't as if his father actually wanted him around, anyway.

* * *

"If that girl's face gets any longer, she'll be dragging her chin on the floor," Daniel observed to his wife.

"Missing her man," Mary noted dryly, but there was a serious point underneath it.

"Yes... those two do seem to have become surgically sutured together in a remarkably short period of time. I swear, half the time I have to lever the two of them apart with a crowbar."

She swatted his shoulder. "He's a good boy, and your daughter's a sensible girl. You leave well enough alone."

Daniel growled good-naturedly, but conceded the point. "Ah, well, he's a couple of states away now. That seems like just the right distance to me."

"Daniel Barrington, must you glorify in your daughter's misery?"

He sighed, and sat down. "She really is missing him, isn't she?"

"The two of them are inseparable," Mary agreed. "No doubt the poor boy's suffering just as badly out there in New Hampshire."

"Probably worse," said Daniel darkly. He hadn't forgotten the evidence of brutal bruising he'd seen on Jed's back when he returned from his last visit home. The boy had tried to deny it, but it was obvious he'd been violently beaten... and just as obvious who the perpetrator must be.

As a doctor, Daniel knew better than to consider such a 'punishment' acceptable no matter what the crime, but his every experience of Jed had suggested he was as polite, respectful and obedient a boy as you could wish. It was difficult to imagine his behaviour giving even the most irrational mind sufficient reason to deliver such a beating. He only ever grew forceful in speech and manner when he was fired up about one of his pet issues - of which he had many.

Grumble as he did, Daniel had to admit that Jed and his daughter were really quite two of a kind. They both had a passion for putting the world to rights that could keep them arguing the driest issues of history, religion and politics for hours on end. He sensed that Abbey and her young man would never have the problem of running out of things to talk about.

Apparently, though, _not_ getting to talk to each other might be more of an issue.

"It's a shame," Mary said sadly. "It would have been nice to have him here again for the holidays. He's such a lovely boy..."

"Ah, but Matthew will be home in a few days," he reminded her. "I doubt he'd welcome bunking up with a complete stranger."

"I'm sure Abigail wouldn't mind the company," she said slyly, and chuckled aloud at his disgruntled expression.

"Quite," he said icily, and let his breath out in a sigh. "Anyway, it's hardly up to us. He's in New Hampshire, and we can scarcely drag him back just because our daughter misses him." He rubbed his forehead. "It's less than a month, it won't kill either of them. And Abbey's bound to cheer up once Matthew gets home."

He hoped.

* * *

"I'm back! Mom, dad, are you home?" Matthew Barrington bounded cheerfully into the family home, and grinned as he saw his little sister poring over one of her hefty medical books at the table. "Hey there, squirt."

He crossed over to ruffle her hair, knowing how much she hated that. She punched him in the arm, but it seemed only a half-hearted shadow of her usual vehemence.

"Hey, what's with you?" Matt demanded, pretending to be injured. "Not happy to see your prodigal older brother?"

"It's a real thrill," she said dryly, not looking up. He peered over her shoulder.

"Oh, so diagrams of... the oesophagus are what you kids are looking at for fun these days? Why aren't you off painting the town red with Ronnie, hmm?"

"Well, firstly 'cause his name's Ron, not Ronnie, and secondly 'cause we broke up."

"You broke up?" Matt's eyebrows shot up. Ron Ehrlich was an old schoolfriend of his, and last time he'd been around, he and little sis had been quite the cutesy couple. He presumed this breakup was the reason for the moping. "How come?"

Abbey shrugged minutely. "We just... talked about some stuff, and we decided that we didn't really fit together anymore."

Matt frowned in bemusement as he grabbed himself a drink from the kitchen. "Oh, come on, what kind of reason is that?"

She gave him a sharp look. "A good one?"

He slumped casually into the chair across from her. "No it isn't. Come on, what really happened? Did he dump you?"

"Nothing! And no, he didn't dump me. It was a mutual decision."

Matt snorted in disbelief. "A mutual decision? What the hell is that? You just both walked up to each other one day and said 'Oh, hey, changed my mind' and that was that?"

"Pretty much," Abbey agreed shortly, flipping another page.

"Yeah, right. He got a new girl?" he queried sharply.

Abbey shrugged. If it was a facade, it was a good one, but then he'd expect no less from his devious little sister. "Don't know. We haven't really kept touch."

She didn't _sound_ like crazy stalker rejected girlfriend, so he tried the other possibility. "Oh, so _you_ got yourself another man?"

Bingo! She hesitated a beat too long before answering him. "I have another boyfriend now, yeah," she said, in her best 'wanna make something of it?' voice.

Other men might have cut and run at the sound of that tone, but hey, he was big brother, and he knew no fear.

Well, at least since she'd grown out of biting, anyway.

"Oh, c'mon, Abs, you and Ron had it made!" he protested. "You're just gonna throw him over for the first flash new guy who comes along? What is he, captain of the basketball team? Got his own sports car?" He would never have put Abbey down for the type to be so fickle, but, well... girls. Crazy, the lot of them. He knew Ron, he was a cool guy; why would Abbey throw him over unless it was for some dumb pretty-boy who'd come along and dazzled her eyes?

Abbey gave him an icy look that she'd borrowed and perfected from both of their parents. "Firstly, I did not throw Ron over for anybody, we _just_ split up. Secondly, no, he's not a super-jock, and he doesn't have a flash car. His name is Jed, and he's not some stupid rebound guy, he's totally smart - way smarter than you - and really fun to be around."

Matt snorted and picked up his suitcases. "Whatever," he tossed over his shoulder. Abbey was _so_ obviously dazzled by this Jed guy, whoever he was, who'd probably waltzed in all flashy and fake cool and lured her away from nice guy Ron. Well, if this guy thought he could get some kind of easy score with _his_ little sister, he was in for a rude awakening.

Matt resolved to meet this Jed at the earliest opportunity... and put the fear of God into him. Or at least, the fear of a very protective big brother.


	3. III

** III **

Jonathan smirked solicitously as he drove towards the station. "So, c'mon - spill it!" he urged. "How far have you got, man? Have you and Abbey- you know?"

Jed narrowed his eyes. "You're totally sleazy, I hope you know that. You're gonna grow up to be a dirty old man drooling over teenage schoolgirls, I can just see it now."

His little brother chuckled to himself, shaking his head. "Oh, man. You are _such_ a prude," he snickered as he pulled into the parking space and stopped the car.

Jed got out and leaned down to talk to him through the window. "For your information, some of us care about more than just sex, actually."

Johnny tilted his head on one side to regard him. "Oh my God, you are actually a girl. Next you're gonna tell me that she's 'The One' and you want to sit and hold hands and pick flowers together."

"Shut up," he muttered through gritted teeth, as he grabbed his suitcases and walked away. His brother's mocking laughter followed him all the way to the station.

But he didn't care. Because he was going back. Home, almost - although here in New Hampshire lay his birthplace and all the life he'd known growing up, some internal compass had already begun to point towards Abbey. Laugh though his brother might at the concept, he was sure of it; yes, she _was_ the one. She was the one for him, and his heart lightened with every step he drew closer to her.

It dropped again at the prospect of the train journey from hell ahead of him, but still. One step at a time.

* * *

"Abbey!" There he was, all bright smile and big blue eyes. He looked exhausted from the journey, but mustered the energy to speed up as she saw him approaching. Last time she'd met him from the train like this she'd hesitated to run to hug him; now she revelled in the chance to indulge that impulse. He gave a soft sigh that matched her own gratitude to no longer be separated from this young man she'd grown to need so much in so short a time.

"I missed you."

"Yeah."

Further conversation seemed unnecessary when there was perfectly good kissing to be getting on with instead.

"Enough of that." Her father tapped his foot and glared sternly but affectionately at the two of them.

"Yes, sir." Jed stepped back obligingly, but there was still a glint in his eye; he'd come a long way from the shy, hesitant boy he'd been when first getting to know their family. Growing comfortable had pulled him out of his protective shell, and his more devilish, playful side popped to the surface. She liked to see that side of him; it was so wonderfully at odds with his solemn, deeply serious half to see him acting like a mischievous little boy.

"Dad drove me up here; we can go by your place to drop off your bags and then you can come have dinner with us," she explained.

He shot a quick, almost apologetic glance towards her father. "Oh, you don't have to do that-"

"No, but Mary will be quite distressed if we don't bring you back with us," he answered in a no-nonsense tone of voice. "I think she thinks they don't have food in New Hampshire."

"Besides, we didn't bring you all the way back here just to kill yourself with food poisoning," Abbey interjected. Jed turned his best injured look her way.

"I can cook," he insisted, eyebrows high.

"You can _burn_," she corrected.

"Hey, I _like_ my toast that way."

"Black?"

"It's good for the digestion."

Her father rolled his eyes at them. "Be quiet, the pair of you, and just get in the car."

She squeezed into the back of the car with both Jed and his bulging suitcases for the ride back. It was a tight fit, but she barely noticed; the two of them spent the entire journey grinning madly at each other.

"I really missed you," he repeated, in a tone that made her insides melt.

"I missed you too."

They leaned towards each other. Her father glared in the rear-view mirror. "You start on that in my car, and one of you's walking home."

They both giggled, and Jed contented himself with a quick kiss to her cheek instead. They snuggled closer despite the intrusion of his luggage on their space.

"My brother Matt's still home," she told him. "You can meet him at dinner."

Jed pulled a mock-worried face. Or possibly an honestly worried one; she might well have mentioned a few times that her older brother had a protective streak that was easily the match of her father's. "Is he gonna want to beat me up?"

"He'll love you," she assured him. Of course he would.

Eventually, anyway.

* * *

This little shrimp was the famous Jed? Matt could hardly believe it. The guy practically came up to his navel. He supposed that didn't matter so much to somebody as short as Abbey, but still. She'd ditched Ron for this guy?

The two of them were making sappy eyes at each other all through dinner. Apparently it wasn't just Abbey who'd been suckered by Mr. Josiah Bartlet; their mother was obviously taken with the guy, and even dad treated him with a confusing amount of respect.

Matt didn't see what they all saw in him. He was short, nerdy, and he talked too much. The whole meal long he hadn't shut up about politics, of all things. Matt had tuned out most of the fine details in self defence. Honestly, what self-respecting college boy wanted to debate the intricacies of the Constitution over dinner?

Apparently, the one that Abbey was smitten with.

"So, _Josiah_, what are you studying?" he asked as they both cleared away plates to the kitchen. "I tried to ask Abbey, but I couldn't get a straight answer."

"I'm, uh... well, I changed classes in the middle of the year. I was originally going to shift to economics, but it turned out I couldn't get all the classes I needed so now I'm majoring in American Studies. Um... call me Jed?" he finished, the fervent 'please' hanging unspoken on the end of the sentence. Matt smirked.

"Fickle," he noted, with a glance across at Abbey. She refused to deign to meet his eyes.

"Not really," Jed said seriously. "I'm still going to do the economics, just as a second degree. And my old major, theology, I'm keeping on as a minor."

"Theology?" Matt frowned disparagingly. "What were you going to do with that?"

"I was going to be a priest," he said, quite solemnly, and Matt choked.

Abbey leaned in with a smirk. "I'm a great corrupting influence."

Jed grinned across at her. "She lured me away from a life of innocence and piety in the church, you know," he said wryly.

"Ah, you'd never have kept it up." They cheerfully shared a kiss right in front of him, to Matt's great disgruntlement.

Apparently, little sister's new boyfriend was more difficult to pin down than he thought. Not a jock but a nerd, and one with a religious background at that. Still, being raised a Catholic was no cure for the even more pressing condition of being a teenage boy, and it wouldn't hurt to put a little fear into him just in case. He leaned against the wall and looked him up and down. "You play any sports?"

Jed looked uncertain, as well he should. "I used to play some basketball," he offered hesitantly.

Matt refrained from any obvious jokes about being the ball.

"Great," he smirked. "Let's shoot some hoops."

* * *

Jed had a strong suspicion he was going to get pounded. He was already tired from the long journey, and Abbey's brother had several inches and a good few pounds of muscle on him. Still, there was his manly pride to consider. He'd pointed out as much to Abbey. She'd snorted and walked off, muttering something that ended with a scathing "_Boys_!" Well, at least if he did get pounded, it wouldn't be with an audience.

His prior basketball experience was pretty much limited to exactly this kind of backyard scuffle; he'd been on the team in prep school, but a kid his height without any spectacular flair to make up for it rarely got a touch of the ball. He was used to shooting hoops against his little brother, who was taller and probably fitter, but pretty lazy about pressing home his advantage. Matt Barrington, on the other hand, was clearly out to teach his sister's new boyfriend a lesson. There was little time for idle conversation; Jed's main priorities were to avoid horrifically embarrassing himself, and, if at all possible, make at least one basket.

So far, objective two was looking like a distant dream, and objective number one wasn't going too swimmingly, either.

His breath was soon wheezing in his chest; he really wasn't built for prolonged exertion. Matt was running rings round him and enjoying it, but he struggled on anyway. If this had been any old testosterone face-off he would have cut his losses and backed down by now, but he felt a stupid urge to impress Abbey's brother. Vague thoughts he didn't quite dare fully grasp hold of muttered about family gatherings and the possibility of a brother-in-law.

Such a brush with scarily enormous future plans dizzied him for an instant, and Matt took advantage of the moment to steal the ball yet again. Jed made a desperate stretch to block him, and Matt suddenly paused. "Hey." He frowned, and lowered the ball to bounce it. "What happened to you?"

"What? Oh." He hurriedly tugged his sweater down to cover his stomach. Bruises, still. He tended to forget they were there after the initial sting faded. "I'm... I'm kind of a klutz," he excused with a quickly nervous smile.

"Yeah?" Matt didn't look convinced. "Well, maybe we'd better call this off before you trip over in the dark and kill yourself or something."

His big mouth was getting ready to claim he could still play just fine, but, unusually, common sense intervened. "I should probably be getting back. I've still gotta unpack all my stuff."

"Suit yourself." He lazily bounced the ball and then turned around to make a perfect shot. Jed hurried back to the house to say a final goodnight to Abbey. He felt Matt's suspicious eyes on the back of his neck, watching him go.


	4. IV

** IV **

Matt appeared, leaning against her bedroom doorframe while she was getting ready for bed. "Feel better after your little macho man act, do you?" she asked wryly.

"Your boyfriend's not much of a basketball player," he observed.

"Oh, woe! Suddenly all the shreds of my attraction to him are tearing away." She clutched melodramatically at her heart. "Oh, wait. False alarm."

Matt scowled pensively. "I don't trust him, Abs. There's something shifty about him."

A chuckle of disbelief bubbled up from inside her. "Shifty? Jed? Oh man, you really are from planet obnoxious big brother, aren't you?"

But instead of copping to overactive protective instincts, he simply shifted his balance and frowned deeper. "I'm serious, Abs. I saw when we were playing basketball; he's got bruises all over him, and he won't say a word about where he got them."

"He's a klutz!" she shrugged, growing exasperated with this relentless suspicion. He didn't even know Jed, otherwise he'd realise his vague accusations were ridiculous.

"Yeah, that's what he said. Looks like he's so klutzy he accidentally walked into somebody's fist."

"Oh, get over it, Matt, will you?" she groaned.

"I'm just saying. You might want to ask your boyfriend where he got those bruises, because it looks to me like Mr. Perfect Boyfriend's a bit of a scrapper on the side. You don't get those kind of bruises tripping over your own feet."

"You're so wrong," Abbey insisted, shaking her head.

"Okay!" Her brother threw his hands up in the universal 'humouring that crazy girl' gesture. "Just don't say I didn't warn you when he turns out to be some kind of trouble."

"He won't," she said, and got up to close the door against him.

Jed, a scrapper? The very thought made her almost giggle. She was positive there was no violence in him, and besides, he was hardly the size to go round picking fights. But still; Matt might be an idiot, but he was her big brother, and he'd obviously seen _something_ that had got him concerned.

Could Jed have got beaten up during his trip home? A random encounter with some old school bully, perhaps... or, it would be just like him to step into somebody else's fight with his crazy selfless instinct for stopping injustice. And even more like him not to admit a word of it so nobody would fuss over him.

That could be it. She'd ask him about the bruises tomorrow, and no doubt there'd be a perfectly reasonable explanation, not whatever conspiracy theory her brother had apparently dreamed up to make him an unsuitable boyfriend.

He was most _definitely_ a suitable boyfriend. Everything she could have wanted in a guy and a few things she'd not thought to ask for, all wrapped up in a package that was pretty darn cute to look at, too. She curled up and went to sleep with Jed's face in her mind, and a smile on her lips.

* * *

"Hey."

"Hey!" Coming out of the house he shared with his roommates, Jed grinned delightedly at Abbey as she jogged the rest of the way up the street to join him.

"So, did you take up boxing when you were back home?" she asked brightly, bouncing up to sit on the wall beside him.

"Huh?"

"Oh, my idiot brother's got some idea you've been in a fight. Said you've got bruises all over you."

Dammit. Why had Matt had to go and make such a big thing of it? "It's really nothing. I just- You know what I'm like," he shrugged.

"Show me," she commanded.

He snorted a laugh, part amused and part startled. "You just want to ogle my naked body," he accused with a smirk.

"Cheap thrills, cheap thrills," she grinned. "Come on, strip," she ordered.

"Yes ma'am." He rolled his eyes and quickly yanked up the bottom of his shirt to flash the faded bruising on his stomach. "See, that's all."

"Yeah, actually _show me_," she grumbled, snatching the cloth as he let it fall back. He had to admit, despite the awkwardness of the moment, that having Abbey determinedly yanking his clothes off him was not the worst thing ever. She inspected his bruises seriously. "Does this hurt?"

"In my experience, only when crazy girls start poking it with their fingernails. _Ow_!" He pouted.

"Aw, poor baby." She let go of his shirt, leaving one hand on his chest underneath it in a way that made his heart beat pleasantly faster, and kissed the corner of his mouth. "How'd you do it?"

He thought on his feet, as his childhood had accustomed him to doing. Awkward bruises... it was just so much easier to be able to give a simple explanation. "It's... well, this is dumb." He brushed back his hair. "Me and my brother, we had this... we used to have this old tyre swing at the bottom of the garden? And we were kind of messing around down there, and-"

"I see where this is going," Abbey noted dryly.

"Yeah. Yeah, I'm a klutz, okay? But in my defence, it was totally his fault."

"I'm sure." She chuckled throatily, and laid her head against his shoulder; he squeezed her gently around the middle.

There was a slight pang of regret at the thought of lying to her... but really, wasn't this much better all round? She'd only get upset, and she'd probably get a pitying look in her eye, and- and it wouldn't change anything anyway. No, much better to put such things far behind him in his father's home where they belonged, and enjoy the happiness and the sunshine.

They sat that way for a while, Abbey absently bumping her heels against the wall.

"You have uncomfortably bony shoulders," she observed after a few moments, sitting up and rubbing her neck.

"If your mother keeps trying to feed me the way she has been, that won't last long," he pointed out. Mary Barrington had apparently decided he was 'too thin'. He wasn't sure at which point he would _cease_ to be too thin, but if the amount of food she kept trying to cram down him was any indication, she was aiming for somewhere around three hundred pounds.

"If my mother's trying to feed you to death, it's a sign you've been adopted into the clan," Abbey explained. "She still sends my brother food packages every other week, and he eats like a pig."

"I don't think your brother likes me," Jed admitted. Abbey shrugged and let out a nonchalant huff of air.

"Yeah, well, he's just Matt. It took him long enough to get used to Ron, and he's known him since junior high. I don't think he approves of me swapping boyfriends."

"Well, neither do I!" Jed said fervently. "Now you've got me, I'd rather like you to keep me."

She grinned angelically up at him. "Well, that's good, 'cause I'd rather like to keep you too."

Abbey swooped in unexpectedly to kiss him on the nose. He retaliated by suddenly yanking her closer so she was half-sitting on his lap, she mussed up his hair, and it quickly devolved into a giggling heap at the bottom of the wall.

It was hard to remember a time in his life when he'd ever been this happy.

* * *

Ben shook his head in amused exasperation at the way the younger boy gleefully bounced about his bookstore duties.

"So tell me, Happy," he asked dryly, "when are the rest of the seven dwarfs gonna show up?"

Jed just stuck his tongue out, and scrambled up onto the counter to grab a book from the nearest high shelf. He even seemed to have become more athletic since he'd taken up with Abbey. No less clumsy about it, alas, but definitely full of a bright energy that had been absent in the shrunken, perpetually tired and overworked student he'd been before.

"I don't know what that girl's done to you, but if I could sell it in a bottle, I'd be rich."

"You can't synthesise it," Jed grinned. "It's _her_. She's amazing."

"You're a dork." Ben rolled his eyes.

"I'm a dork in love," he shrugged, and jumped down from the counter, staggering the landing a little and wobbling into the bookshelf.

"Bet that hurt."

"Didn't."

Indeed, he shot off at a near jog, hyperactive as ever. Ben put his book down and affected a serious expression. "Okay, this has got to stop."

"What has?" Jed frowned. Ye gods, he even _frowned_ with a cheerful twinkle in his eye.

"This! It's not right. You're a student, man! Slouch! Sleep in! At least _try_ to look dull and lazy, you're scaring the customers."

Jed paused and shook an admonishing finger. "You, my friend, are just jealous, because you do not have the love of a good woman to see you through the rocky road of life."

"The rocky road of- Did you swallow a book of poetry?"

"I'm in love!" he said expansively. "The whole _world_ is written in poetry."

Ben thumped his head against the desk, and covered it with his hands. "I liked you much better when you were depressed," he groaned.

Jed just smirked, damn him... and started to whistle.


	5. V

** V **

_Dear Mrs. Landingham._

He paused, considering his words carefully.

_I'm sorry I haven't written lately. Life has been -_ he grinned _- eventful._

I suppose the first and most important change that I should warn you of is that I no longer intend to enter the priesthood. After some soul searching, in perhaps its most literal sense, I have come to the conclusion that the monastic life is not for me, and if I am to do God's work in this world, it will be in some other, heretofore unforeseen capacity.

As you can imagine, this has had rather an impact on my plans for the future. I no longer intend to major in theology; as it stands, I now plan to minor in that subject, and to major in American Studies. After this, I may go on to take a second degree, in economics. One of my tutors, Dr. Weber, has intimated to me that I could almost be assured a place at the London School of Economics, should I choose to apply.

You probably wonder why I wouldn't jump at such at chance, and the truth behind my reluctance is a little surprising, even to myself. You see... I met a girl.

Yes, I can hear you laughing, even from here.

I really did. I met a girl. A wonderful girl. Her name is Abigail Barrington, and I think I love her. I haven't told her that yet, but I think she knows. I'd like to think she loves me too, although she could do much better. I hope she doesn't figure that out. Not very altruistic of me, I know, but I honestly don't know what I would do if I should lose her.

Listen to me, I must sound totally lovestruck. And I am. I didn't know I could ever feel like this about anyone. She's so amazing! I feel like I've found a part of myself I didn't know was missing. I have not yet reached the stage where the lyrics to sappy love songs start seeming profound, but I'm sure it's only just around the corner.

And so to my future. I find I can no longer think of a single future plan that doesn't include her. I want to go to London, but how can I ask her? We've barely known each other half a year, and already I dream of whisking her off around the world with me. And she has plans of her own - she wants to go to medical school, and how could I be so selfish as to ask her to delay that or change that because I would miss her so if she didn't come with me? Could I live that time without her, if I had to?

It sounds so crazy when I put it down on paper, and yet these questions occupy my waking moments. I find myself awhirl with questions and crazy thoughts of a future so far ahead that it almost seems a deadly jinx to think of it. The world is suddenly full of so many strange and wonderful things to dream of.

Father, of course, disapproves, but I expected that. He was furious when I first announced my intent to join the priesthood, now he is furious that I abandon it. It's cold and lonely in New Hampshire without you. I find I have no one I can talk to. I'd swear Jonathan is taller every time I go back, but he never grows any wiser, and he doesn't understand or care about the things I think about.

I no longer know what I intend to do with my life - where my path was once a true and clearly marked line, I now see a trail that branches into more possibilities than I can count. Perhaps I will go to London. Perhaps I will not. Perhaps I will become an economist, or a teacher, or something else that I have not yet thought to dream of.

I only know that wherever I go, I plan to have Abbey with me. You always used to chide me for not living up to my promise, not standing up for myself and being all I could be. I think that in Abbey, I have found the strength at last to do so, and as long as she is by my side, I'm ready for my future, whatever it may be.

Yours, as ever,

Jed.

He set down the pen and re-read the letter, a little unsettled to have bared his soul so readily on paper, yet also somewhat proud. He sealed it quickly before he could reconsider his courage, and pocketed it to walk down to the postbox.

Writing to Mrs. Landingham somehow had almost the effect of talking to her. Even before his missive had winged its way across state lines to reach her, he could hear her no-nonsense tones in his mind, telling him what to do, refusing to allow him that one inch of wiggle room he wanted to give himself.

He knew what he had to do, he'd just been avoiding it. Sooner or later, you had to step away from the safe ground, and make your leap of faith. He would talk to Abbey, and tell her of his opportunity to go to London, and how desperately he wished not to be parted from her for that time. He would find out what the future held.

* * *

He found his chance to talk to Abbey a few days later, when Matt had been safely seen off to the train station to return to college, and the two of them finally got to grab a moment together out on the back step where she'd first kissed him.

"Cloudy tonight," she observed, her head against his shoulder.

"Yeah." Only a scattering of stars was visible, and they twinkled furiously in the strong wind. Still, the others were still up there somewhere.

"The year's going fast," Abbey said softly, and he wondered if her thoughts had been following the same tracks as his own. "Seems like it was only Christmas a moment ago, then it was spring break, now Matt's off back to college and the new term's starting..."

"And soon it'll be summer," Jed finished.

"And then what?"

"And then-" He broke off, not knowing the answer.

"If I go off to college, I won't be able to see you," she burst out suddenly, looking upset.

"I know." He watched his own fingers, twining around each other.

"I mean- What if I get accepted out of state, or if- what happens once you finish your degree?"

Jed bit the bullet. "Dr. Weber thinks I could get into the London School of Economics."

"London?" She looked horrified for a moment, then her face quickly grew firm with resolve. "I could look for a med school in England- take some college courses over here, and transfer over when you go..."

He laid a gentle finger across her lips to silence her, and followed it up with a kiss. So many plans to make... but at least his worst fears had been allayed. She wanted to be with him. What else mattered?

"We'll think of something," he said softly. "We'll find a way to be together. I- I don't want to lose you, Abbey. I feel like- I don't know what I feel like. I've never felt like this before."

"Me neither." She snuggled closer against him, and he breathed in the scent of her hair. "Spring break felt so long... I don't know if I could last a whole semester without you."

"It won't come to that," he promised. "Even if I have to come back here every weekend, it won't come to that."

She chuckled gently. "Oh, come on, you couldn't hitch your way home from five miles away, you're gonna make your way across the Atlantic every week?"

"For you I would," he said solemnly. She tilted her head to look up at him, eyes bright.

"Smooth talker."

He smirked. "Always."

"You've got a silver tongue," she accused.

"And you should know. These days you're more closely acquainted with it than I am."

"_Jed_!" She punched his shoulder, only pretending to be outraged.

"Well, you're insatiable!" he defended himself. "Every time I turn around, you're trying to- Mmph."

She pulled away from him several long and rather enjoyable seconds later. He quirked an eyebrow. "QED."

"Shut up," she ordered, shaking her head but grinning widely, and then she kissed him again.

The future was still to be decided, but who cared? Right now, the present had rather a lot to recommend it.

* * *

Daniel had to admit that - provided he didn't dwell _too_ closely on exactly what had been going on out on that back step - he was developing quite an affection for the boy. As his young opponent frowned over the chess board, he thought privately to himself that Jed had changed a lot in the months since they'd known him.

Jed had never been precisely shy, but certainly he'd been very unassuming, and extremely reluctant to put others to any trouble. As he'd grown more comfortable around the Barringtons, his true colours had come to the surface; and they were some bold and impressive colours indeed.

Jed had strong opinions about many things, but he was also willing to listen, and had an insatiable desire to learn. He had a facility with words that made him fascinating to listen to; he would have made a great preacher, had things turned out differently, and Daniel thought that now perhaps he might do well to turn to teaching or some other profession where his ability to speak would serve him well.

"Have you thought about what you're going to do when you leave college now?" he probed gently. They'd fallen into a habit of this, chess games in the evenings before Jed went home. Most young men would probably have performed some quite impressive gymnastic feats to wriggle out of spending time with the father of their girlfriend, but Jed seemed to welcome it. Daniel supposed he had little opportunity to ever spend such time with his own father.

He rested his chin on a fist now, thoughtful over more than the permutations of the current arrangement of chess pieces. "I've been think about applying to the London School of Economics."

"England?" Daniel regarded him sharply. "Quite a step."

"I know." He took a chance, and slid his knight in to take one of Daniel's bishops. "I was talking to Abbey about it, how we- It would be difficult."

"Different sides of the world," Daniel noted, moving to protect his rook being menaced by the knight. Jed swallowed slightly, as if building his courage.

"She did suggest that... maybe for a few years she could think about... transferring to a medical school in, in England..."

"Oh yes?" he said, with careful neutrality. Jed dropped his eyes nervously.

"Obviously, it's just a- it was just an idea-"

"Jed. I've long ago learned the futility to expecting to be able to order my daughter to do anything. If she wants to chase you across the globe, then no doubt she will whether it has my blessing or not... so we'll let her make her own decisions." Jed's shoulders relaxed noticeably in relief. It seemed he had not quite shed his habit of expecting to be angrily cut down or even struck for daring to voice a suggestion which might not meet with one hundred percent approval.

Which brought Daniel onto his next point. "But that's for further in the future, and there will be time to discuss in more in due course. What about this coming summer; are you going home?"

"Uh, yes sir, I suppose."

"You could stay here, you know," he said neutrally. Of course it would involve some creative juggling with Matthew present if Jed's house rental couldn't be extended over the summer months, but he was damned if he was going to send the boy back to whatever horrors New Hampshire held without offering an escape route. Matt had come to him before returning home with suspicious questions about the number of bruises Jed had on his body, and Daniel had pulled him aside for a discreet talk. After that, his attitude to his sister's young boyfriend had thawed out noticeably.

Jed seemed momentarily startled by the offer, then took a deep breath. "Sir, that's... that's very generous of you, but New Hampshire is my home. It's where my father lives, and my brother, and I ought to- I ought to go back and see them."

Daniel read the unspoken subtext to the words, and could support the sentiment if not the sensibility of it. He didn't want to give in to fear; to run from his father now might mean running for the rest of his life. Commendable, perhaps... but it still exposed the boy to a violence he shouldn't _have_ to face up to.

"Very well," he nodded, turning his attention back to the chessboard. "But the offer is open."

He only wished there was some way he could do more.


	6. VI

** VI **

The summer approached all too fast, with examinations and papers and late study sessions stealing time on all sides. Jed's switching of classes had taken its toll, and even a brain as quick as his at picking up new ideas still didn't cancel out the sheer weight of work to be caught up on. He rarely saw Abbey, and when he did, both of them were up to their eyeballs in stacks of books and notes.

Finally, one particularly hectic Saturday, Abbey threw down her pen in disgust, and shut his book with a thump. "Hey!" he objected indignantly.

"Hey yourself," she shrugged, unrepentant.

"I was reading that!"

"Yeah? Go on, tell me one sentence you read in the past fifteen minutes?"

His brow furrowed, but both his brain and his eyes were blurred, and he found to his chagrin he honestly couldn't recall a single thing.

"So much for study time, huh?" Abbey mumbled. She crawled across his lap to sit with him, and he set aside his books to embrace her.

"I'm sorry, Abbey," he sighed, resting his forehead against hers. "There's just... so much work to do!"

"I know." She stood up, taking his arm. "Come on." She pulled him towards the door.

"Where are we going?" he frowned.

"Who cares? Let's just get out of here."

"Okay." All the common sense arguments about why he should stay and finish his assignments seemed to melt away, and he was powerless to resist following her.

They ended up walking the streets of South Bend in the early dusk, eating ice-cream. The muscles in Jed's neck that seemed to have become a constant ball of tension gradually unknotted themselves.

"This is really a waste of time," Jed noted, but lightly. The sense of urgency that usually surrounded his studies had bled away in the peace of the evening. He'd needed this break more than he realised.

"I know. Isn't it great?" Abbey grinned at him.

He grinned back. "You have ice-cream on your nose." He reached out to smudge it away with an affectionate thumb.

She responded by nudging his arm so that his own ice-cream went everywhere. "So do you."

She kissed him, and licked ice-cream from her lips. He pulled away from her, laughing and wiping his face. "You're a crazy, crazy woman," he said, shaking his head. "I can't take you anywhere."

They walked on, hand in hand, falling into a silence that was not the strained emptiness of awkwardness, but the comfortable quiet of not needing to put things in words. The air was warm, to Jed's biased senses at least, but with just enough of a breeze to not make it sticky and uncomfortable.

"Do you really have to be gone all summer?" she asked sorrowfully, after a few minutes.

"My rent pays up at the end of the semester," he admitted reluctantly. "I can't just stay at your house, it's not fair on your parents, and anyway your brother'll be there. And besides, my father wouldn't understand." That was a given. "He'd think we were living in sin."

"I'm sure a little bit more sin wouldn't hurt," Abbey said dryly, startling him into a snort of laughter.

"Ha, so that's your game, is it? Not so fast, lady, I'm a good Catholic boy, and you'll have to make an honest man of me if you want to have your wicked way with me."

She snickered and wrapped her arms around his neck. "Well, I'll look forward to it," she purred close to his ear, and Jed squirmed, receiving a visit from one of those blushes he'd hoped he was finally growing out of.

It was only as they walked on it occurred to him that they'd both practically taken it as read that they would one day be married. It was something that neither of them had explicitly touched upon in their talks of the short-term future, and yet it was such a cornerstone of all his hopes and dreams that he could no longer imagine things any other way.

He would have married her that very evening, given the choice, but he was gripped by uncertainty and indecision. Were they old enough? He still felt very young at times, and Abbey was even younger. Would her parents think they were old enough? What could he begin to offer her, when he was still a college student struggling to achieve independence from under the shadow of his father?

Abbey smiled, and nudged him. "I was gonna offer you a penny for your thoughts, but from that look on your face I doubt I'd get change from a dollar."

Acutely aware of the subject matter he'd been so intently focusing on, he blushed for the second time in one short stretch of minutes. "Dirty thoughts?" she teased, smirking.

"No, actually. Pristine and devout, and guaranteed to be fully approved by the Catholic church."

"Aw. That's not nearly as much fun." She pouted, and he tugged her closer to him.

"You're a wicked woman, Abigail Barrington."

"That's why you love me," she smirked playfully.

"That, and many other reasons."

They stopped, and kissed for a good long time, unmindful of any passing strangers who might roll their eyes and mutter about the debauched youth of today. Jed didn't care what anybody thought about him and Abbey, his father included. He knew how _he_ felt about her, and that was all that mattered.

* * *

Jessie chewed the end of her pen in anxious frustration. "I'm telling you now, I can't _wait_ until this is all over. Roll on summertime."

"Mmm." Abbey was, as usual of late, distant and distracted.

"Hey! Miss Abigail! Attention, please."

"What? Oh, sorry, Jessie." She shook her head. "Miles away. I was looking at med schools."

"Still?" Jessie said disbelievingly. She tugged one of the brochures closer to examine it. "Didn't you already get all your- hey, wait." She frowned. "Isn't this in England?"

"Yeah, I wrote to a few," Abbey agreed. "I wanted to see what the schools are like out there."

"England? Come on, Abbey, you've already been accepted every place you applied! While the rest of us are stuck here chewing our nails. Now you want to compound the torture by getting acceptances in whole other continents?"

"I was thinking about doing maybe a few years of my training over there," she admitted.

"Why- Oh, let me guess. To be with _Jed_." She said the name in appropriately lovestruck twelve-year-old tones, and rolled her eyes.

"Shut up." Abbey coloured slightly, and nudged her sharply in the side.

"Seriously, Abs, you're gonna pack up and move a thousand- ten thousand- okay, I have absolutely no idea how far away England is from here, but you know, you're gonna move that far away from home chasing after some boy?"

"Yup," said Abbey, with every evidence of certainty. Jessie shook her head.

"Sister, you have got it bad."

"I know," she agreed, grinning cheerfully. Jessie shook her head again... and then sighed.

"Damn, I gotta get me a Josiah Bartlet."

"Well, Jess, I love ya, but you're not having mine."

"Hmph." She folded her arms. "Don't see what you see in him anyway. Okay, he _is_ kind of cute, and he's nice, and he does sweet stuff..." She slumped. "Oh, God, I _really_ need a boyfriend."

"He's pretty something, all right," Abbey agreed dreamily. "He's... Honest to God, Jess, I never realised I could be in love like this."

Jessie gave her a searching look. "Really? You're really that in love with him?"

Abbey gave her a dry look. "Jess, have I been talking to the wall for the last two months?"

"No, I know, it's just..." Abbey had never been the kind to make such declarations lightly. "You really think he's-" she curled her lip slightly in reflexive cynicism- "The One?"

"Jess, a year ago, I'm not sure I even believed there was such a thing as 'The One'. Now I know, and he's it. I've never been more sure of anything in my life. I don't care where I have to go or what I have to do to do it... I'm not letting this guy go."

Jessie had been friends with Abbey since junior high, and there was one thing she'd quickly learned - when Abigail Barrington got that light in her eye, you'd better believe she was going to do exactly what she said she was, just you try and stand in her way.

* * *

Jed smiled at the familiar, precise handwriting, and unfolded the letter with care.

_Jed,_

I'm sure it will greatly offend your delusions of grandeur to tell you this, but you're really not half as surprising as you think you are. I had a suspicion for some time that you and the priesthood would come to a parting of the ways, but you always were stubborn about these things.

If your father disapproves of you, then you're probably doing something right. I'm sure I don't need to tell you to treat the girl decently, but I hope you've made it clear exactly what she's in for. You were never an easy person to know when you were a teenager, and I doubt you've changed much with age. I hope for her and your sake your Abigail has enough of an ego, a temper, and a dose of common sense to deal with you.

Economics, now, is it? Well, I'm sure you'll do just fine at it - you never had any problems in the classroom at whatever you turned your hand to - but don't think you're going to spend the rest of your days in some dusty little academic department with a chalkboard. The world has grander plans for you, so get ready for them.

Look after yourself, do the right thing instead of the easy thing, and don't stop thinking.

And eat more vegetables. I've seen what you think is an acceptable diet, you'll die of malnutrition.

Dolores Landingham

Jed chuckled softly to himself, and his roommate Jason paused on the way through to the kitchen.

"Letter from home?"

"No- Well, yeah, kind of," he reversed himself. He smiled. "From my big sister, pushing me around like always."

He folded up the letter, and tucked it away in the folder where he kept all his papers of great importance.


	7. VII

** VII **

This was it; the day had come. Abbey's heart was drumming violently in her chest, and she thought she was going to throw up. It wasn't _fair_, it was too soon, the last few weeks had gone so _fast_...

She hadn't felt this ill in the build up to any of her exams, or even opening her college acceptance letters. Then, it had been a nine in ten parts irrational fear of disaster; now, it was cold, hard reality. Jed was going away. Not forever, but for the summer, and that sure as hell _felt_ like forever from where she was standing.

If she'd been the kind of girl to indulge in weeping and wailing, she'd probably have done some, but histrionics had never been her style. Besides, what was she going to do, rant at Jed for leaving her alone? He felt just as wretched about it as he did, and _he_ was the one going back to some kind of hellish family situation that she didn't really even know about. It was obvious his father treated him abysmally, although he wouldn't openly admit so.

"I'll call you every day," Jed promised, face a study in misery. "And I'll write, and I'll- I'll get my brother to take pictures and send those, and..." He shook his head. "I'm gonna miss you so much."

"I don't want you to go," she admitted. Despite best intentions, tears were prickling at her eyes. Jed was so much a fixture of her daily life now. How could she go a whole summer without seeing him smile, without curling up in his arms to listen to the radio, without sitting on the back step kissing under the stars?

She hadn't thought it was possible, but Jed's look of distress grew even deeper. "Don't cry," he said, in a soft, dismayed tone that warmed and broke her heart simultaneously. Abbey closed her eyes as he brushed the tears away with his thumbs, and kissed her before pulling her close against his chest. "It's gonna be hard- so hard- but it's okay. I love you, and I'm coming back." She looked up in time to catch him smiling his most determined smile. "There's nothing in the world that could stop me coming back."

She smiled helplessly back, drawing strength from his conviction. "You'd better," she said, expression still fragile. "_Somebody's_ gotta kick my father's ass at chess."

"I'll practise," he said dryly, raising one eyebrow in an arch. And then they were both laughing, for no particular reason, just leaning against each other and laughing, because it was better than crying, and you had to do _something_.

"You'll call me every day?" she asked, leaning her forehead against his.

"Twice a day," he promised extravagantly. "Three times! I'll call you three times."

"You'll get kicked out of the house when the phone bill comes through," she warned.

"Then I'll hitchhike back here and turn up on your doorstep."

She grinned at him quickly. "Just make sure you don't get picked up by any strange girls in pickup trucks."

He put on that deep, playful voice that made her knees weak every time. "Oh, believe me, I learned my lesson. I still haven't recovered from the last one."

"So I should hope," she said archly, and spoiled it by smirking. He planted a series of little kisses all over her face, until it tickled and she had to push him away, giggling. "What are you _doing_?"

"Sensory memory," he said, with great seriousness.

"Exactly how much of me are you planning to memorise?" she demanded playfully.

"As much as I can get to without your parents kicking the door down," he said, kissing the side of her neck to prove it.

All too soon, there was an knock at the door. "Ah, dammit," he grumbled, pulling away.

Her mother's voice floated through the door. "Okay, kids, you've got thirty seconds to put your clothes back on, and then I'm coming in."

"Mom!" Abbey blushed, and Jed chuckled.

"We're decent, Mrs. Barrington," he hastened to assure her.

She came in with a distinct smirk. "Well now, where's the fun in that?"

"Oh, _mom_," Abbey repeated helplessly, burying her face against Jed's neck in mortification. Possibly the only thing worse than a mother who disapproved of your love life was one who was entirely too enthusiastic about it.

Her mother gave Jed an affectionate kiss on the cheek, and straightened his collar for him as she was always doing to Matthew. "Now come back to us whole and healthy, young man, and try not to do anything incredibly stupid over the summer."

"I'll try not to," he promised, and Abbey snorted sceptically.

Jed gave her mother a hug. "Thank you, Mrs. Barrington, you've been so kind and generous to me, I couldn't have asked for half the things you and your husband have done for me."

She smiled. "Well now, my Abigail thinks you're worth it, and she's usually right about these things." She tilted her head somewhat regretfully towards the door. "Car's waiting."

Jed and Abbey exchanged a pained glance, and linked hands. Almost time to say goodbye. They headed out to the car.

* * *

And now here they were; the station, the platform, and the train arriving any minute. No more time for pretence and procrastination. Dr. Barrington, instead of performing his usual glowering chaperone duty, had discreetly retired to the car to give them a moment alone.

"I really will call," Jed assured her earnestly.

"Not if I call you first," Abbey corrected.

He chuckled softly. "We'll _both_ get chucked out of the house when the phone bills come in."

"Then we'll meet in the middle, and camp out."

He frowned, considering. "Where would the middle be? Somewhere in Pennsylvania, maybe? Hang on. If it's-"

"Jed." She placed a finger over his moving lips to still them and looked him in the eye. "Are you _actually_ spending our last minutes together doing math in your head?"

He grinned unrepentantly, and gave her a playful look from under his lashes. "If I left Manchester on a three o'clock train going fifty miles an hour, and you left South Bend at five o'clock going sixty miles an hour, when would we meet?"

She kissed him. "Not nearly soon enough."

The train was coming in. It shuddered to a halt, the wind of its passage ruffling Jed's hair and snatching at her blouse. "I have to go," he said reluctantly, raising his voice to beat the noise.

"I love you."

"I love you too!" He grabbed his suitcases and backed towards the train. "You know it's not too late to stow away in my luggage," he called after her from the doorway.

"I wouldn't fit in with all your economics textbooks," she called back.

"I'll throw them out!"

"You'd dump your books for me?" she asked, placing her hand on her heart and pretending to go weak at the knees.

"I'd dump everything for you. Always!"

"Come back to me!" she called urgently, as the door swung shut between them and the train began to slowly chug back into motion. 'I love you,' he mouthed again through the window, and blew her a kiss. She blew one right back.

Abbey watched him leave, squinting after the train long beyond the point where she couldn't tell which window was his anymore. The train melted into the distance, carrying Jed further and further away from her with every passing moment.

Her father stepped out of the shadows, and placed a comforting hand on her shoulder.

"Come on, honey. Let's go home."

* * *

His brother looked somehow different when he stepped off the train; longer haired, perhaps not quite so skinny, even a tiny bit tanned. Perhaps he'd actually spent some of his time _outside_ this semester, instead of locked up in his bedroom with his books.

Johnny gave him a lazy wave from the platform as his train pulled in. He almost called some kind of stupid line, but something in the firm set of his brother's jaw discouraged him. Teasing his brother was no longer the easy sport it once had been; they were growing apart now that Jed lived away from home, and he wondered how long it would be before his brother outgrew his home and his family entirely. Jed had never been destined to be tied to the small town life, mock as he did even Johnny knew that.

Jed gave him a tight and tired smile as he crossed the platform. "Hi, Johnny."

"Rough journey?"

"Something like that." He looked around. "Isn't there a phone around here somewhere? I need to call Abbey."

Johnny chuckled and shook his head. "Man, has she ever got you on a short leash."

Jed just shrugged him off. "It's called love, little brother, look into it."

He rolled his eyes. "You're sickening."

He just smiled airily, and continued on his way to the phone. Johnny edged closer, ostensibly to guard the suitcases, in reality to adopt the time honoured practise of eavesdropping while pretending not to care in the slightest.

"Hello? Oh, hi, Mrs. Barrington. Yeah, it was fine, I- Yes, I _did_ eat on the train. No, I- Mrs. Barrington, it may shock you to know this, but occasionally I do actually eat." His brother's voice deepened into a chuckle, and it startled him; it was a man's laugh, and quite different to the wry looks and sarcastic snorts that usually passed for Jed's rather bitter brand of humour. He sounded... well, cheerful and carefree, the latter a word Jonathan had certainly never associated much with his older brother.

His tone shifted again as his girlfriend came onto the phone. "Abbey," he breathed, with a warmth that made Johnny shift uncomfortably to be listening in. "Yeah. Yeah, I'm home. I'm at the station. Yeah. My brother's standing about ten feet away, pretending he's not listening."

"I'm not listening," Johnny retorted over his shoulder.

"You hear that?" Jed asked the phone. He looked up at his brother. "Abbey says hi." He turned his attention back to the phone conversation. "Listen, I'll you call you again later tonight. I just wanted to let you know I got back okay. Hey- Hey, not even I can get lost on a train, you know. No, really, I- Okay. Yeah. I'll talk to you tonight. I love you. Bye."

He put the phone down and smiled a brief, melancholy smile before turning to face Johnny, who was looking at him with a frown.

"Yeah?" he asked a little self-consciously.

"You."

"Me what?"

"You've changed."

He shrugged slightly, not denying the suggestion. "I'm doing different things now. I want different things. I've got Abbey, I'm maybe going to London, one day I'm gonna be married and have fifteen kids..."

Johnny snorted slightly, as much in startlement as amusement. "Really?" he wondered, eyebrows raised.

Jed gave him a quirk of a grin, then quickly reassembled his straight face. "The exact number's open to negotiation."

He hefted one of the suitcases, and shot his brother a look. "What the hell kind of negotiation have you been up to down there?"

Jed smirked and shrugged. "Come on, let's go."

Johnny trailed after him, wondering who this new bright-eyed and playful young man was, and what he'd done with the flustered, frustrated brother he'd used to know.


	8. VIII

** VIII **

The slightly bemused reaction he'd got from his little brother gave way to the usual frosty reception once he returned home. He supposed it was too much to hope that his father would have cared about any change in his attitude, or approved of it if he did.

Home had never been the most comfortable of places to come to rest at, but spending time with Abbey and her family had only served to heighten his awareness of how truly lonely and miserable New Hampshire was for him now. He hadn't kept touch with any of his casual school friends well enough to renew acquaintances now, and of course Mrs. Landingham was gone. There was only Johnny, and he had his own life to live, no longer accustomed to having an older brother around. It didn't help that Jed had changed so much over the past block of months, his time with Abbey revealing and stretching aspects of himself he hadn't really been aware even existed.

Besides, there had always been an awkwardness between the brothers. When they were boys they could bridge it with childhood games and squabbles and the solidarity of being united against the adult world in general, but they weren't boys anymore. They were men, or on the cusp of being them, and very different men at that... and the subject of their father was a heavy, unyielding slab of silence hanging between them.

Nobody ever discussed Jed's relationship with his father. It just... was. He liked to believe that his father's resentment of him hadn't always been there, but since his mother had never spoken of it either, there was no way he could have asked. Certainly, by the time reachable childhood memory kicked in, he had already been old enough for it to be readily apparent that he was not quite the same as most of the other little boys.

It had taken him a long time for him to realise that it was his intelligence that set his father off. It was so much a fundamental part of his being... the insatiable hunger to learn, a childhood vocabulary several sizes too large, questions other children would never think to ask, everything in how he approached and how he analysed the world... that he'd never been able to understand anything more than that trying to speak up made his father angry.

He'd learned, gradually, from seeing the way his father's lips would tighten in the presence of his uncles, with their flash jobs and expensive clothes and the conversation that always seemed to be just one small step too quick for his father to be part of. He'd learned from the extra brutal beatings he'd received when he impressed them. He'd learned from watching Johnny, with his B and C grades and his preference for baseball and bikes over chess and calculus.

He'd learned, but it hadn't fixed anything, because... how could he stop himself from being smart? And how could he ever be prepared to give it up, even if he knew how to? It was all of him, it was everything he had. The more his father punished him for showing his intelligence, the tighter he clung to it. He stood up and took every beating it earned him, because it was that or stop standing up, and be utterly destroyed.

His father's enmity had taught him to be endlessly stubborn, remain defiant in the face of certain defeat, and treat arrogance as a necessary tool to keep his abilities alive. If everybody in the world said he couldn't do something, then everybody else was wrong and he was right. In his own singularly cruel and brutal way, his father had been the making of him.

The making of the crude foundations of him, anyway. He might never have made anything more of that core of fiery determination if Mrs. Landingham hadn't turned up to keep giving him pointed nudges every time he was tempted to slip back into complacency or frustration. She'd forced him to pick a direction and start moving. The fact that the priesthood hadn't been the right path didn't even matter - he'd started _moving_, and a body in motion remained in motion, while a body at rest stayed at rest. If she hadn't given him the good swift kick he'd been seriously needing, he might never have got out of New Hampshire, and found out who he was outside of the shadow of his father.

And then he'd met Abbey... and she'd taken the core of the Jed Bartlet that had been forming beneath the surface and yanked him, blinking, out into the sunlight. Which was simultaneously scary as hell, and the most incredible thing that had ever happened to him. It wasn't that being with her made him a new person, it made him _himself_, freely and fully, in a way that he'd never had the chance to be before.

He missed her so keenly it was a physical ache. Talking on the phone or reading her letters was as much a twist of the knife as blissful relief, like the cruelty of keeping a man dying of thirst alive with just one sip of water at a time.

Jed spent much of the time in between in a kind of low-grade depression, able to find nothing in New Hampshire to distract him from or alleviate his misery. Relations with his father, at least, were frosty rather than turbulent - no doubt a listless, miserable son was greatly preferable to one bubbling over with smart talk and smarter ideas. Johnny just shook his head, unable to comprehend how Jed could be so hung up on his absent girlfriend when there were tons of other pretty girls around to pass the time of day with.

He missed her terribly, and there was nothing at all he could do about it. So he just spent his time reading and re-reading letters, waiting for her calls, and willing the summer away, minute by minute.

* * *

"Hey, Abbey, c'mon!" he nudged his little sister out of whatever funk she'd drifted into.

"Oh, sorry." She shook herself awake and stood up. "What were we-?"

Matt rolled his eyes. "We were gonna drive over to Mike's?"

"Oh! Yeah. Yeah, just give me a minute to go upstairs and get ready?"

"Okay, but hurry _up_?" He shook his head as she scurried off, and wandered into the doorway of his father's study. "It's like living with a zombie," he grimaced.

He didn't have to explain what he was talking about. Dr. Barrington sat back from the chess board, and frowned. "Yes, she has been behaving rather like she's had a limb lopped off," he agreed. "It was bad enough over spring break, and they've only grown closer in the time in between. The two of them can't seem to survive more than a couple of days apart before coming down with a bad case of separation anxiety."

"I can't believe she's pining for the guy that much," Matt scowled. "She was never like this with Ron." It was weird to see his sister so completely wrapped up in a guy. She'd always been so independent.

That earned him an eloquent dry look. "One would suspect that's why Ron is out, and young Jed is in."

"Seriously, I think we're all going to go crazy if we have to live with this all summer. Can't even get _near_ the phone, I think the mailman thinks she's got a crush on him or something... Sheesh, can't we club together and buy the two of them a rail trip? Or, failing that, some sedatives?"

His father frowned grimly. "It's... difficult. It's not a question of money, and I'd certainly be more than happy to have the boy here for a couple of days... His father doesn't approve."

"Of Abbey?" Matt growled, perfectly happy to employ double standards when it came to his sister's dating life. Just because _he_ didn't think she should be seeing anybody didn't mean he was prepared to put up with anybody else disapproving of it.

"Of his own son, I think," said his father softly. "Jed won't speak about it, but there's obviously something wrong in the Bartlet homestead."

"You think his father beats him?" Matt asked quietly, remembering a particularly sobering conversation a few months ago when he'd indulged in some hot-headed speculation about Jed's acquisition of some highly suspicious bruising over the spring vacation.

"I'm sure of it," he said with cold seriousness. "He didn't really deny it, and it's obviously not a one-time occurrence."

"Why doesn't he just _leave_?" Matt demanded frustratedly. "He's not a little kid, why does he even go back there?"

"It's family, Matthew," his father told him with a quietly sad smile. "It's never that easy when it's family. But you're right, he's not a child... and much as we might want to, we can't just march in there and rescue him from his own life. All we can do is make him feel welcome in a proper home, and help give him the support he needs to work out how to rescue himself."

Matthew would have argued with that - the man was obviously an abusive SOB, why _couldn't_ they just haul Jed out of there and let him know it was for his own good? - but at that point Abbey came galloping down the stairs. "Okay, okay, I'm ready!"

"Took your time," he jabbed reflexively.

She rolled her eyes. "Yeah, can you believe it took me, ooh, almost four minutes?"

"What takes four minutes in getting ready?" he wondered aloud. "You can knot your own shoelaces these days, right?"

She swiped him lightly with her bag. "Look, do you want to go out or not?"

"Yeah, yeah. But I'm driving," he warned. She stuck her tongue out at him. "Well, it's good to know that you've matured while I've been away."

Jesus, was his baby sister _really_ dating and getting ready to go off to college?

She whirled to face their father. "Dad, if Jed calls-"

"I'll take a message," he agreed, with a long-suffering sigh.

There was no doubt about it. _Something_ had to be done about those two, before they drove the whole family screaming insane.

* * *

"Hey, Jed?" His brother yelled in passing, winding his way back through the house from the front door. "You've got a visitor."

He knew it couldn't possibly be Abbey, but still his heart rose in his throat in desperate optimism. God, he really was a hopeless case, wasn't he? Most likely it was somebody from church, or an old school friend following a random whim to catch up. He went to answer the door.

"Well, hey there, Jed."

He gaped in surprised amazement.

"You might want to shut your mouth. That's really not an attractive look on you."

He shut it, and felt it curl up into a smile of genuine delight. "Mrs. Landingham! What are you doing here?"

She gave him a dry look. "Well, that secretary's job didn't work out, so I've taken to selling girl scout cookies door-to-door. Seeing as how you couldn't keep your hands out of the jar the whole time I had it on my desk, I figured I could put you down to cover my profit margins."

The familiar flavour of her sharp brand of sarcastic humour seemed to cut through the staleness of his time in New Hampshire like a knife. He stuck his hands in his pockets, unable to stop grinning.

"It really is incredibly good to see you," he said earnestly. "Um, you look nice," he added, not hesitant because the sentiment was in doubt but because it was something he would probably never have thought to come out with a few years ago.

However, she was more interested in running an analytical eye over him. "I see you're not as pale and skinny as you used to be; finally learned the benefits of getting out into the outside world once in a while?"

"There's more to life than books, Mrs. Landingham," he said with a smile.

She arched an eyebrow. "Well, that's a novelty coming from you." He just shrugged.

"I've changed."

"So I see. Well, how about we figure out what you've been doing with yourself these past few years, and we'll see whether you've learned any new bad habits you need shaking out of."

He took no offence, only smiled; Mrs. Landingham's constant needling of him and refusal to let him rest on his laurels was a whole different world from his father's blanket disapproval. "Wouldn't miss it for the world," he said.

And meant it.


	9. IX

** IX **

They ended up wandering down to the local park, because Mrs. Landingham had Views about what was and what wasn't appropriate, and visiting young men in their homes most definitely wasn't, regardless of whether they had their brothers in residence. Jed spent much of the walk down there babbling excitedly about Abbey.

"So, did you make a decision about London?" Mrs. Landingham asked shrewdly.

"Uh, yes, we did." She didn't fail to notice how it had suddenly become a 'we' there. "I'm gonna go for it, and Abbey's going to look at maybe transferring to a medical school in England when I go, and... we'll see."

"Girls don't generally cross international borders with boys they're not serious about," she noted.

"I sincerely hope not," he agreed.

"So when are you going to ask her to marry you?"

He choked slightly on the directness of the question. "I, um... I've been thinking about it," he admitted honestly. "But I'm not sure if... I mean, it seems too soon. I don't think it is, but it seems too soon." He smiled slightly to himself. "And, you know, there's always the possibility she might beat me up and say no."

Mrs. Landingham raised an eyebrow. "That's an option?"

Abbey had never been exactly one to bow down and do things just because they were traditional or expected. "It might be."

"I like her already."

Jed smiled, and stopped to watch two boys ride past on bikes. He realised talking now with Mrs. Landingham that he didn't feel half so much like a little boy as he'd used to. Somewhere along the line, he'd grown up. It was a strange feeling.

"You never did tell me," he realised. "Why are you in New Hampshire? Are you going to be staying a while?" He tried not to sound too pathetically hopeful, but wasn't sure he succeeded. This was the first time he'd felt relaxed since he'd come home for the summer, and going back to lonely misery really didn't appeal.

"You remember Mrs. Baskin from the school?" He nodded, a vague memory of a horse-faced woman in a floral dress floating to mind. He'd never been much of a one for remembering names. "Her boy Alan was killed overseas a couple of months ago. It's been pretty hard for her back here by herself, so I'm going to be staying with her for a while, to see how I can help out."

"Oh." He was abruptly sobered. "That's terrible. She probably doesn't remember me, but... tell her I'm so sorry."

Mrs. Landingham gave him a quiet smile. "Everyone remembers you, Jed."

He looked at the ground, hands in his pockets. All this fighting going on across the world... there were plenty of worse places he could be right now than stuck in New Hampshire with his father and without Abbey. It was time he stopped feeling sorry for himself. He looked up. "Is there anything I can do? I'd... I'd like to help."

She smiled at him approvingly. "Well, why don't you come along and visit tomorrow and we'll see. I'm sure there are some jobs around the place that need a strong young man to do them, and I know she'll be glad to see you."

Jed nodded, accepting the responsibility, and paradoxically felt lighter. If he couldn't be enjoying this summer vacation, then at least he could be helping somebody else. As usual, Mrs. Landingham had stirred him out of his self-indulgence, and reminded him that sitting around dwelling on his own problems wasn't helping anybody.

"I'm glad you're back, Mrs. Landingham," he said earnestly, and, impulsively, gave her a hug. She seemed somewhat surprised by the gesture, but not entirely displeased, patting him on the back slightly.

"Now, what's got into you?" she wondered. "When did you become such a huggy person?"

"Love has made a new man of me, Mrs. Landingham," he said airily, the light tone concealing the deeper truth beneath it. His upbringing had not accustomed him to gestures of physical affection, and it had taken Abbey and her family to gradually teach him there was a whole world out there where it was perfectly acceptable to be just as demonstrative as you liked.

Or at least, as demonstrative as Mrs. Landingham was prepared to let him. "All right now, that's quite enough of that kind of silliness," she chided, but affectionately. "Now you run on back home, and I'll see you tomorrow."

He headed back to the house with a smile on his face.

* * *

Jed's newfound spirit of determination, perhaps inevitably, didn't sit well with his father. He was less than thrilled to learn of his son's continuing contact with Mrs. Landingham, and probably would have banned Jed from seeing her entirely if it wasn't for the outpouring of praise Mrs. Baskin had heaped on the headmaster for sending 'such a fine boy, so willing to help out' to come and see her. As it was, Jed endured the punishments for his 'inappropriate friendships' and 'unseemly behaviour' without comment.

After all, he was used to it.

He found he liked Mrs. Baskin more than he had when she was teaching him to conjugate verbs, but it made him somehow sad how delighted she obviously was to see him each time. It wasn't right that her son should have been killed off in some battle he'd had no business ever being in. He wondered if when they'd decided to go to war, anybody had stopped to think about the Mrs. Baskins of the world, shuffling round the house in a kind of aimless daze and laying out plates of cookies for boys who weren't her son but could maybe give the house a breath of youthful life just for an hour or two.

He found it set him to thinking about children a lot, which was a strange and somewhat unnerving train of thought. His plans to join the priesthood had taken that aspect of life well out of the equation, and even after leaving that track he hadn't really stopped to put it back in. The idea of creating a little life that was partly him and partly Abbey - it never crossed his mind for a moment to think that the mother of his children would be anyone but Abbey - was a dizzying and also scary one.

The shadow of his father loomed large over everything. Would he be a good father? Could he learn from his own father's shortcomings, or would they somehow repeat themselves in him against his will? If he was a father, he'd want to be one like Dr. Barrington, but he wasn't sure he knew how to do that. Could you even choose that for yourself? Surely his father hadn't set out to deliberately be distant and impossible to please. Perhaps he didn't even know he was.

The trail of self-doubt his father awoke in him was hardly unfamiliar to him, but this was a new avenue of attack, and one he'd never bolstered his defences against. Uncertainty chewed at the foundations of the strength of his love for Abbey, asking himself if he was sure he was really good enough for her. He wanted to marry her... but should he? Could he ever be as good a husband as she deserved?

All his doubts and hesitations seemed to melt away whenever she was on the other end of the phone... but the moment that contact was lost, they came flooding back.

He wasn't sure how to broach the subject with Mrs. Landingham, suspecting it would only earn him a brush-off in the form of a brusque exhortation not to be stupid. Mrs. Landingham didn't believe in indulging crises of confidence. And most of the time she had a point, but... this was something far too important to trust to just a leap of faith.

Approachable sources of good advice being somewhat thin on the ground, he ended up trying to talk to his brother.

"Johnny," he asked thoughtfully one evening, massaging his wrist to dull the ache of working too hard with barely healed bruises, "have you ever thought about having kids?"

"Oh Christ, who's pregnant?" his brother asked immediately, looking slightly panicked.

"Nobody!"

Johnny placed a hand over his heart. "Then Jesus, don't scare me like that."

Jed gave him a sharp look, and wondered what the hell his little brother was getting up to these days. "It was just a question."

He shrugged shortly. "Kids? Why? Christ, _I'm_ still a kid."

"Well, maturity-wise," Jed agreed dryly.

Johnny sat down on the edge of his bed and frowned at him. "You're thinking about having kids?"

"Yeah."

"Now?"

"Not right this minute, no."

Johnny gave him a look. "Next few years now."

He shrugged. His vague imaginings hadn't taken grasp of anything so concrete as a timescale, let alone one so fast, but laid out there the idea had a kind of terrifyingly mesmerising appeal. "I don't know. I was just... I was just thinking." He sighed. "Worrying, I guess."

"You're worrying about kids that don't exist yet? Jed, are you actually familiar with the concept of 'fun'?"

He flopped back onto his bed and looked at the ceiling. "Do you think I'd be a good dad?" he wondered.

He didn't have to look across at Johnny to know he was being stared at. "What the hell kind of question is that?"

"I just... I worry. With..." Things unspoken hovered on the outskirts of the conversation. "Everything. I worry."

There was a creak of bedsprings and, surprisingly, Johnny came over to sit beside him. He squeezed Jed's shoulder with perhaps something just a little softer than his usual see-what-a-manly-man-I-am bluster. "That's... really dumb. You do know that, right?"

"Is it?" Jed mumbled, eyes half closed.

"Um, yeah. You're good at everything," Johnny reminded him. "You're really irritating like that."

He gave a humourless half chuckle. "It's not quite the same."

Johnny was silent for a while. "You're a good big brother," he said very quietly. He quickly followed it up with "When you're not annoying. Which is, you know, generally about two minutes out of the whole year, but, you know, sometimes."

Jed smiled and struggled to sit up. "I guess," he agreed, feeling a little better. Maybe Johnny was right. He'd never managed to be like his father in all the ways he was punished for not being, so why should he assume he'd be like him in this? If he was going to marry Abbey, if they were going to have kids, he'd be the kind of husband and father he wanted to be. And maybe having a bad example to try and avoid was just as useful as having a good example to follow.

His brother, getting up, gave him one last piercing look. "Okay, and Abbey's _definitely_ not pregnant?"

Jed threw a pillow at him.


	10. X

** X **

"Hey, squirt." Matt rapped his knuckles on the doorframe, and Abbey sat up.

"What?" she asked warily. He was smirking. He never smirked that much unless he was up to something.

He produced an envelope with the air of a conjuror. "Got a special delivery for you."

She snatched it from him eagerly, deflating slightly when she realised it wasn't one of Jed's letters but a plain white envelope. Puzzled, she tugged open the flap, and found herself holding train tickets.

"Train leaves first thing tomorrow," Matt supplied. "Better get packing."

Abbey frowned at him. "What-?" She examined the tickets more closely, and realised they were for two people to Manchester, New Hampshire.

Matt continued to grin triumphantly. "Dad set it up. He says you can go, long as I go with you. The hotel rooms are booked for three days."

She stared at him for a moment, barely able to comprehend what he was saying, then jumped to her feet and ran right past him and down to her father's study. "Daddy!" she squealed, throwing herself at him in the kind of hug she was supposed to have grown out of. He patted her back in tolerant amusement.

Trailing after her, Matt shook his head in mock-disgust. "Hey, hey!" he objected. "I am the bearer of good news, I am your guardian and companion, but do _I_ get any thanks?"

She had overexcitement to spare. Taking her older brother by surprise, she grabbed him too, and kissed him on the cheek. "Thanks, Matty!"

"Hey!" he pulled back indignantly, wiping his face and scowling. "None of that, thank you. And don't call me Matty, or I won't take you to New Hampshire."

She turned to her father. "I can really go?"

He chuckled indulgently. "It's all paid for; consider it a belated graduation present. But your brother's going along with you, so don't even think about any funny business."

She batted her eyelashes. "Would I?"

From the look the two of them exchanged, her best innocent look could do with some polishing. "I'll keep her door bolted," Matt said, and she elbowed him in the side.

"Grow up, Matt."

"I will. You're not allowed to."

She stuck her tongue out at him, but nearly bit it off because she couldn't stop grinning. "Oh my God," she babbled. "Tomorrow? Oh my God. Oh, I have to pack!" She rushed towards the stairs.

They were both standing laughing at her, but she didn't care. She was going to see Jed!

* * *

Jonathan was taking advantage of the summer weather - or, at least, as summery as New Hampshire got - to wash his car. Jed seemed to be completely befuddled as to why it was necessary to do this on such a regular basis, but then Jed had never been one for the finer points of cruising for girls.

Girls, of course, liked boys with cars. And girls tended to distrust boys who seemed to be untidy or lazy. Therefore, it followed that girls would be impressed with boys with shiny cars. QED.

Working this argument with Jed, however, seldom got anywhere because he _would_ insist on bringing things like personalities and feelings into the equation. And all that was fine, but Jed just didn't seem to get that the plan was to first get a girl, _then_ worry about whether or not she was going to be your soulmate.

But then, that was Jed all over - just too damn _focused_. He was always dreaming, always looking to the future, never stopping to look around and notice that you could have a whole lot of fun in the here and now if you took the opportunities.

Talking of which... pretty girl at two o'clock. Johnny grinned to himself, and moved casually around to the other side of the car to watch her approach. Wow, she really _was_ an eye-catcher... and she was moving his way.

Oh, happy day.

"Excuse me," she called. She had the twang of an accent that he couldn't quite place, but it sounded just fine to him.

"Hey." He flashed his best charming grin, and was rewarded with a friendly smile in return. "Can I help you?"

"Maybe. Um... are you by any chance Jonathan Bartlet?" she asked.

Okay, and there was a point when 'happy day' turned into 'okay, somebody pinch me, I'm dreaming'. He was confused. He was also pretty sure that if girls who looked like this were going to be looking for him, he ought to know about it. "Uh, yeah. Um, do I-?"

Further confused small-talk was cut off by an excited shout from behind him. "Abbey?"

The girl twisted away from him, and waved madly. "Jed!"

Wait. _This_ was-?

"Oh, God, I missed you so much-" _This_ was the extremely unnerving vision of his brother barrelling past him, faster than Johnny remembered seeing him ever move in his life. And- whoa. That, right there, was definite snuggling. He had not, hitherto, ever considered his brother to be particularly likely to snuggle with _anybody_. Let alone in the middle of the street.

"I don't understand," Jed babbled. "How did you-? Where did you-?"

She coolly quirked an eyebrow at him. "Okay, Jed?"

"Yeah."

"Stop talking now."

"Oh, right."

Johnny then got to be witness to a display of rather enthusiastic kissing. He was entirely too amazed to remember to be appropriately disgusted. This was the same big brother who a year ago wouldn't have known what to do with a girl if an entire cheerleading squad had tripped over him?

They finally pulled apart, breathless. "Okay-" Abbey began. Jed grabbed her and kissed her again.

Johnny, somewhat worried to find he was in danger of picking up his brother's old habit of blushing, took the opportunity to look around and wonder if the neighbours were watching this. This was not the Jed he knew _at all_.

Abbey regarded his brother dryly as they parted a second time. "Can I talk now?"

"If you really must," Jed grumbled, and she laughed, and kissed him on the nose. They were both grinning at each other like maniacs.

"Dad organised it as a surprise. Me and Matt are going to be staying in Manchester for a couple of days."

"Matt's with you?" He looked around.

"Yeah, but he's gone off to get a drink. Which should take him a good long while. For a theoretical chaperone, he's surprisingly easy to bribe."

Johnny almost did a double take at his brother's wicked smirk. "Well, that should come in useful. 'Cause I don't think we really need an audience."

This seemed like a good cue to remind them both of his existence with a loud clearing of the throat.

Abbey tilted her head towards him. "Your brother doesn't count?" she asked.

Jed tugged her closer against his chest. "Well, I could be wrong, but I'm fairly sure he's not actually planning to beat you up for making out with me." He glanced across at Johnny, still wearing that unfamiliar face-splitting grin. "Right?"

"No. But I am leaning towards leaving the area before the sugar levels in the atmosphere get high enough to make me sick."

Jed smirked at his girlfriend. "You hear that? He just called you sickening. Aren't you going to do something about it?"

"Sure." She thwacked Jed around the back of the head. "Idiot."

"Ow." This appeared to be more in the nature of a deliberately petulant whine than actual pain.

She placed her hands on either side of his face, and considered him for a moment. "Did you grow your hair longer?"

"I was planning to run away to become a rock and roll star," Jed said with a straight face. "Or a movie idol. Maybe both."

"Who's gonna pay money to watch you?"

He wiggled his eyebrows suggestively. "You would."

She inspected her nails casually. "Maybe. Would you be taking your clothes off?"

Johnny choked. He was not used to girls who made jokes like that. Let alone his big brother - his churchgoing, overpolite, deeply moralistic big brother - smirkingly encouraging them every step of the way.

"Tell me," Jed said, raising a eyebrow, "exactly what kind of movies have you been watching while I've been away, young lady?"

They both broke up giggling, and hugged each other even closer.

Johnny shook his head, and wondered to himself what universe he'd woken up in.


	11. XI

** XI **

Matt approached the Bartlet family house to find Jed and Abbey still with their arms around each other, exchanging a combination of rapid-fire conversation and smooches as if the entire summer's worth had to be made up for in the next four minutes. He nudged the young man washing his car nearby who had to be Jed's brother.

"God, have they even come up for air yet?"

"I swear to God, they talk so much between kissing I'm surprised they can _breathe_." The kid was wearing the familiar disturbed half-smile shared by the brotherhood of those who were happy for their siblings _in theory_, but would rather not actually see them making out with anybody right there in front of them, thank you very much.

Ah, a kindred spirit. He extended a hand. "Matt Barrington."

"Jonathan Bartlet." He had as firm a handshake as his brother, and already Matt was forming his mental picture of a regimented, stiffly formal father who had rules about how 'real men' should act. "You're Abbey's brother, right?"

"Yeah. You know, it's not usually my job to take my sister places just so she can make out with people," he hastened to point out. "But dear God, _anything_ to stop the moping."

Jonathan huffed a short laugh. "Tell me about it. You'd think he was missing a vital organ or something." He nodded at the oblivious couple somewhat incredulously. "Are they always like this?"

"What? No, sometimes they're affectionate. Hey!" He raised his voice to reach the two of them. "Less of the public groping, please."

Jed looked innocent, and given his choirboy tendencies there might even be half a chance he was. "Who, me?"

"No, her. Hands off, squirt, your chaperone is now on call."

Abbey gave him a look that was flatly unimpressed, but she and Jed disentangled themselves from each other somewhat and walked over, hand in hand.

"Thanks for coming out here, Matt," Jed said, so earnestly that he had to shrug in near-embarrassment. "Really, I appreciate it."

"Hey, gotta keep the sister happy," he pointed out. "She has violent tendencies." Abbey took a casual swipe at him, and he danced backwards. "See? See?"

"I mean it, man," Jed repeated, not prepared to let it go. Matt wondered awkwardly, why the kid couldn't just obey the unwritten manly code and just take shrugs and non-committal grunts as sufficient communication. Why'd he have to go around being all open and sincere all the time? It kept a body totally off balance. "I know there's no reason for you to come all the way out here just so we can spend some time together, and it means a lot to both of us."

"Yeah, whatever," Abbey mumbled. "He _owes_ me."

"Do not," he refuted, pulling a face. Dammit, Jed just wasn't going to be satisfied with a slick evasion of his thanks, was he? "Look, she's my little sister, okay? I help her out. Because of some irrational and rather annoying social and biological ties, and because she would beat me to death with her medical texts if I didn't. Besides, I like you. I have no idea why, and, frankly, it bothers me. But, I like you."

Jed chuckled, and shook his head. He sought for words for a moment then just blurted "Thanks!" and moved to give him a hug. Matt rolled his eyes.

"Oh, for God's sake." But he accepted the hug and patted Jed briefly on the back.

Jed's brother was watching this with some incredulity, and perhaps the slightest flicker of envy. The Bartlet family was one, Matt was pretty sure, that frowned on being physically demonstrative. Jed's semi-adoption into the warmer climate of the Barrington home had been a whole new world to him, and he'd taken to it with all the enthusiasm of a duck who'd only just found out water _existed_, and had some lost time to make up for.

Abbey nudged him. "Hey. Cosying up to the wrong Barrington there."

Jed smirked. "Oh, well. Guess we'd better put that right." Cue another round of sickeningly cute nose nuzzling and little kisses.

Matt looked across at Johnny. "It's like we're not even here," he sighed.

Johnny glanced at his watch, and looked worried. "Jed... dad'll be back soon," he said, in a tone of voice that was definitely a warning. Matt watched Jed's eyes as he straightened up, and caught a flicker of the more solemn and serious boy who was always hidden behind the smile.

"Yeah," he said softly. "You guys should probably be getting back to your hotel, you must have a load of unpacking to do."

Abbey might not have been clued in by their father about the nastier little details of Jed's paternal troubles, but she was far from stupid, and she knew how to read subtext without prompting. "Sure," she agreed. "It's a little late in the day for introductions, and the last thing a guy wants is to come home and find unexpected visitors. We should get going."

"I'll walk with you a while," Jed offered, smiling again now that the stirrings of possible disaster had been averted. "Show you the sights along the way."

Matt raised an eyebrow pointedly. "You have sights?"

"Well, we have trees. And, you know, buildings. And... more trees. But I can tell you some interesting facts about the-"

He rolled his eyes heavenwards. "I'll bet you can." He took hold of Jed's shoulder and began steering the couple forwards. "Come on squirt, Captain Trivia, let's get going. John, nice to meet you."

Jonathan gave him a short, stern nod. "And you."

"Yeah, great to meet you!" Abbey, never one to be shy with a friendly gesture, surprised him with a quick kiss on the cheek. He looked completely startled, but not displeased. Matt gave her a look.

"One boy at a time, please. Now, come on. Let's get out of here before Jed's dad comes back and bawls us out for making the place look untidy."

Truth to tell, it wasn't just for Jed's sake he was itching to be away before the boys' father could return. Matt suspected that if he ever met the guy face to face, he might just be tempted to lay him out with a serious right hook.

* * *

Jed had meant to be true to his word and only walk with the two of them a little way, but he'd had so much to talk over with Abbey, and then it had seemed like only sense find out where they were staying, and then it had been only polite to stick around and help them unpack... Help Matt unpack, anyway - there had been stern injunctions laid against him spending any time getting acquainted with the more intimate items of Abbey's travel wardrobe. He was pretty sure that the end result was to have his imagination get him into a worse state than he would have been just sneaking a peek.

And after the unpacking, well... there he'd been, Abbey in his arms again after so long, and she didn't want him to leave any more than he wanted to go...

And somehow, afternoon had melted into evening, and evening had given way to night, and now it was pitch dark and he was making his way home and his father was waiting up for him.

"Jonathan tells me you've been with your woman," he said coldly. The way he pronounced 'woman', you could clearly hear the other words that were lurking underneath it. His father was good at using words like that.

"Her brother came with her to New Hampshire so she could visit me," he said, _knowing_ that the delight in his voice would only infuriate his father further, but unable to keep it out.

"I will not have you running off to Manchester hotel rooms with young women! It's a disgrace!"

The clear implications of what kind of girl he thought Abbey was sparked Jed to white hot anger far faster than any attack on himself would ever do. "Dad! She had her _brother_ there. We were just _talking_-"

The slap was not unexpected, but they always snaked out just a hairsbreadth too fast to anticipate. "Don't answer me back, boy." His father's fury was always icy, never spilling over into passionate words or posturing. His violence was never impulsive, always calculated. "I do not care what you think you can get up to in your spare time," he spat with perfect articulation, "but you will _not_ bring this family's name into ill-repute."

Jed raised a hand to his stinging cheek. "Fine," he said shortly. "I'll do my best not to... disgrace you." He didn't care how strongly the thread of bitter sarcasm came through.

His father's eyes were cold. "I have given up trying to ask you to comport yourself in the manner a dutiful son should. But you will _not_ see this girl at her hotel, you will _not_ make a public spectacle of yourself, and you will _not_ bring this family any embarrassment!"

"Abbey," he said, very softly.

"Don't even _think_ about looking at the floor when you talk to me. Open your mouth, and look me in the eye when you talk to me."

He raised his head. "I said, her name is Abbey," he repeated forcefully.

The silence hung on for just a beat too long, and he wasn't ready in time for the blow that doubled him over.

"You're a worthless child. Go to your room."

His father turned around and stalked off, not waiting to see if his edict would be obeyed. Jed's breath wheezed in his chest, and for a moment he leaned heavily against the doorframe, trying just to recapture the rhythm of his breathing. Gradually, he straightened up. His muscles were still taut with the tension of his anger, and he couldn't really feel the pain that was sure to revisit him with a vengeance when he laid down for the night.

He stood. And breathed. And went to his room.


	12. XII

** XII **

The ribald marks he'd been waiting to make had died on his tongue with the sounds of the altercation outside. He hadn't heard the actual words. The walls muffled the sound, and when they threatened not to, he could always pull the pillow over his head.

"Hey." Jed gave him an exhausted smile. He moved stiffly; Johnny didn't ask him why.

"Hey."

There was a loaded silence as Jed shuffled over to the second bed and eased himself down. He probably could have judged which part of him was hurting, if he hadn't made a lifetime's study of not noticing such things.

The conversation could resume, once both of them were safely staring at the ceiling. "So that was Abbey, huh?"

"Yeah."

"What's a girl like that doing with a guy like you?" Ordinarily he would have dressed it up in much more playfully cruel terms, but there were times and places where it made him physically sick to be harsh on his brother.

"I honestly don't know," he admitted, with a heavily heartfelt blend of bemusement and awe.

"But if you knew, you'd let me in on the secret, right?"

"If I knew, I'd do everything in my power to keep it happening. I can't live without her."

"Don't go talking like that." It was an innocent figure of speech, but such things could scare him at times like this. He was always scared about Jed, and had been for so long he wouldn't have known how to admit it. Sometimes it was bad, sometimes it was worse, and sometimes there was a fragile kind of peace. He never knew which it could be going from minute to minute, and he didn't know how to stop it.

He'd cried, the first night Jed had left home for college. That was a secret nobody would ever know. He'd cried, not because he was gone, but because he was... away. For the first time in forever. But of course, it was only a temporary freedom; the ties that bound Jed to his father for better or worse weren't severed by anything so simple as a few months at a distance.

Jed rolled over to look at him, wincing slightly at the motion. "I love her, Johnny," he said simply, smiling that same soft little smile he wore when he was talking about matters of God or all the other things he believed in with almost frightening intensity. "I didn't even know what that was about, but I do now. I've found her, and I'm never gonna be stupid enough to let her go."

The emotional level in the room was several shades more serious than he was comfortable with, and he sought to defuse it. "You're not gonna burst into song, are you? 'Cause really, I feel there should be advance warning if you're gonna sing."

He was rewarded with a brief snuffle of laughter. "God, no." Jed groaned. "I've been talking so much my throat's red raw."

"That's pretty hard to believe." Jed was nothing if not verbose. He couldn't keep his mouth shut if his life depended on it; certainly he never did when it was domestic peace or his immediate physical health on the line.

"She's so smart," Jed said dreamily. "I think she's way smarter than me," he added. "But I'm keeping that under my hat."

"I don't know about smart, but she's sure as hell prettier than you."

His brother fixed him with a sharp glare. "And she's _my_ girlfriend, so don't even think about trying anything. She'd kick your ass anyway."

Johnny chuckled aloud, mostly at the entirely novel prospect of his brother playing the overprotective boyfriend card. "Ooh, look at you, all grown up at last," he teased. "You get yourself one girlfriend and you think you're king of the hill."

"One is all you need," he pointed out dryly.

"Yeah, but two would be even better."

Jed snorted and shook his head resignedly. "You're pathetic," he yawned, flopping back against his bed.

"Oh, says the boy who's been following his girlfriend around like she's some kind of goddess."

"That's 'cause she is," Jed shrugged. "Now shut up and go to sleep."

* * *

Abbey found herself somewhat inexplicably nervous about meeting the fabled Mrs. Landingham. It wasn't as if she was actual family or anything... but Abbey knew Jed wrote to her a lot, and he cited her opinion on things as if she was some kind of ultimate authority. Judging by the excerpts from her letters Jed would sometimes share, she was one sharp lady... and she never hesitated to give him a verbal smack round the head when he was doing something stupid. Abbey wanted to make very sure she didn't come across as one of those stupid ideas.

At least the promise of prim and proper female company had shaken Matt off her tail. He wasn't particularly interested in playing chaperone at the best of times, and it hadn't taken a great deal of coercion for him to convince Jed's brother to help him seek out booze, sports and girls. Huh. Boys were such simple creatures.

Jed, of course, wasn't like that. He didn't have the build or the inclination to play sports himself with any seriousness, although he was developing a distressing tendency to support Notre Dame in football. He didn't even drink alcohol now he was old enough to do it legally, and, well, girls had been pretty much out of the question in the years before the two of them had their head-on emotional collision.

Being introduced to people who knew you only as 'the girlfriend' was unnerving enough, quite without the added load of being 'the girl he left the priesthood for'. That kind of thing might give a girl warm fuzzy feelings, but it added an a extra dose of nerves to the prospect of meeting people who might or might not have approved that decision.

They walked along hand in hand, Jed alternating between nuzzling up to her and excitedly pointing out the facts and features of his little home corner of New Hampshire. It was a tad off-putting to notice he approached both activities with pretty much equal enthusiasm, but dammit, she was nothing if not a sucker for his geeky side.

"Jed!"

"Mrs. Landingham!" Jed twisted around, beaming, and tugged her along beside him by their linked hands. He towed her over to meet a pretty blonde woman in plain but very well turned-out clothes.

"And you must be Abigail." She had a very distinctive voice, and a kind of knowing sharpness to her gaze that reminded Abbey rather of her father.

"Yes. Hi," she smiled. "Jed's told me so much about you."

"I told her you were a crazy crotchety old woman who started stalking me when I was in high school and never left me alone," he said dryly.

"You're not safe to be left alone, you're a disaster of epic proportions just waiting to happen," she said briskly. She turned her gaze to Abbey. "I hope you realise what you've let yourself in for."

"I got a clue the first time he started reciting the rise and fall of the Roman empire in epic detail. I had to stop him drawing diagrams."

Jed gave her a faux-injured look. "It's very relevant to political strategy today," he told her haughtily.

"I'm sure it is, honey." That was just one of the many things they'd ended up discussing on that fateful rainy day when she'd offered him a ride home during the big storm. It was a sobering thought that if the weather had only been different, he might have forever remained to her just that rather cute guy who worked part time in the bookstore.

Jed tilted his head towards her and said to Mrs. Landingham "She humours me, you know."

"It's a dirty job, but I suppose somebody has to do it." She smiled at Abbey. "Just don't do it too often, his head has a distinct tendency to swell up."

"Hey!" he objected, with his best innocent look.

"Don't worry, I always trip him up when it gets him too off-balance," Abbey smiled. Mrs. Landingham gave an approving nod.

"I can see at least one of you's got your head screwed on right. Jed, manage to keep up this habit of finding people with common sense to give you a kick when you're going off the tracks, and there might actually be hope for you after all."

She guessed she'd been awarded the coveted Mrs. Landingham seal of approval.

* * *

As he'd always suspected they would, Abbey and Mrs. Landingham got on like a house on fire. Rather _too_ well, actually - it didn't take them long to start conspiring against him.

"I'm still actually here, you know," he pointed out for the fourth or fifth time.

"He has a compulsion to be the centre of attention, had you noticed?"

"I had, actually. Can't sit still when other people are talking." Abbey smirked at him. "You can't even take him to church without him editing the sermon."

"It _matters_," Jed said plaintively. "When you speak, you have to... you have to _use_ the pulpit. Words are powerful. People should use them properly."

Mrs. Landingham gave him that look she was always so good at, where he wasn't quite sure if she was being admiring or gently mocking, and had more than a slight suspicion they were one and the same. "And you're the one to show them how, hmm?"

He slipped his hands in his pockets and smiled. "Yes, ma'am."

Mrs. Landingham nodded at Abbey. "That's one of the signs."

"Oh, I know that one," she agreed cheerfully.

Jed tugged his hands out of his pockets and folded them across his chest, pouting slightly. Having his true love and his oldest friend and confidante comparing notes on Bartlet 101 was not the most ego-building experience ever. He was sure he wasn't _really_ as transparent as they seemed to think he was.

Abbey giggled at his expression, and leaned in to give him a gentle kiss. "Aw, poor baby." He beamed back. It was impossible not to.

Jed caught Mrs. Landingham's eye, and saw she was smiling fondly. He wondered if she'd known all along that he'd been desperately in need of somebody like Abbey. Probably. She always seemed to know what he was a thinking a few steps ahead of him even beginning to think it.

They were enjoying making fun of him, but he would have been happy for the morning to last forever. As he sat in the sun, the warm weight of Abbey's head against his shoulder and smart, snappy conversation eddying around him, the bruises on his chest and the cold home waiting for his return seemed far away and unimportant.


	13. XIII

** XIII **

It was a peaceful summer afternoon, of the sort the Bartlet household seldom saw. Abbey and Jed had returned at much the same time as their respective brothers had finished wandering the streets, and there had been some chatter, and then a brief impromptu softball game that had been hastily halted by Matt when it looked like Abbey was going to humiliatingly defeat all comers. Now the four of them lounged in the long grass, drinking lemonade and not really working up the effort to do anything much. Abbey lay with her head on Jed's belly, tying intricate knots in a piece of grass, while a few feet away Matt and Johnny talked football.

"I missed this," Abbey sighed.

"Doing nothing?" Jed smiled.

"Yeah. It's just not the same, doing nothing on your own."

"I know. I feel so..." He shrugged, causing a grumble of protest from his resting girlfriend. "Sorry. I just feel like... I'm wasting this whole summer, waiting for it to end. I only want to get back out there and- I don't know I what I want to do. But I want to do it wherever you are."

"Mrs. Landingham told me how you've been helping out that poor woman who lost her son. That's really decent of you, Jed."

He sighed uncomfortably, unwilling to let himself off the hook when he wasn't sure of his motives - how much of his efforts were out of genuine altruism and compassion, and how much just desperation to find something, anything, to occupy his time and make the days pass faster? "Yeah, I don't know... I need to feel like I'm doing _something_, but I don't know what. I'd get a job, but my dad really hates the idea of me working stacking shelves or whatever. I think he thinks it makes it look like we need the money or something."

"Looking at you, nobody would think you need the money," Abbey smirked.

"Oh, you can talk, little miss 'daddy sent me to New Hampshire for three days'," Jed teased, rising up to tickle her enthusiastically. She squirmed away in protest, then settled back against him.

"It doesn't feel anywhere near long enough," she said solemnly. "Only today, tomorrow, and then we won't see each other again until after the summer. And even then I'll be starting my college courses, so it won't be like before."

"I know," he sighed. "This whole long distance thing is really _rough_, Abbey. I don't wanna be apart from you."

"I'll come see you every weekend," she promised.

"Yeah, but what am I supposed to do Wednesday night when I get a sudden urge to do _this_?" He rolled over sideways and planted a passionate kiss on her lips. Abbey smirked up at him.

"Well, I can think of a few suggestions, but my chaperone has big ears."

Jed chuckled and pulled her into his arms. "You're a wicked, wicked girl," he murmured close to her neck.

"That's why you love me," she said smugly.

"You bet." He kissed her again.

"So what are you gonna do with the rest of the summer?" she asked him. He shrugged.

"Sit around, stare at the wall..." She prodded him in the side, a shorthand demand for a proper answer. He frowned and considered a while. "I really don't know," he sighed. "I was actually thinking about volunteering down at Congressman Langdon's campaign. But my dad would go spare."

Abbey twisted round to give him a wry smile. "He's not much of a Democrat?"

Jed almost choked laughing at that one.

"Guess not."

"No. Well, actually, I don't know much at all about what his politics are, but he uses the words 'our kind of people' a lot. Whoever they are, I don't think I'm one of them."

"Well, good for you," Abbey smiled at him. "You like Langdon, though?"

Jed frowned. There were politicians he supported of course, and ones he didn't, but most of them left him feeling pretty... huh. There were the bad guys, and then there were... the okay guys. The 'not bad' guys. The 'well, when you consider the alternatives...' guys. But there never seemed to be anybody _exciting_ out there, hardly anybody vibrant and dynamic like a real politician should be.

"Well, you know, I guess. He's better than Peterson. But there was all that business two years ago..."

Abbey gave him a look. "Okay, let's pretend I know nothing about the minutiae of New Hampshire politics."

He let out his breath in a lazy sigh, and lay back. "You're not missing much. I mean, Langdon's okay, but... he's not anything special."

"And you like your politicians to talk as good as your preachers, right?" Abbey presumed.

"And follow through on it," Jed added. "That's the important part."

She grinned at him. "You should run." He snorted, loudly, but she prodded him insistently. "You're a New Hampshire Bartlet - you'd clean up in this state."

"I think I'm a little young," he said dryly.

"I'd vote for you."

"Which would be nice, you know, if I was twenty years older and you were actually registered in this state." He shook his head to himself. "Nah, I'm not a politician. I'd hate... Those kind of decisions would kill me."

Abbey looked up at him and smiled softly. "That's why you'd be good at it."

He held her gaze a moment, and then chuckled and shook his head. "Dear God, I think this is the world's first recorded attempt at seduction via New Hampshire party politics."

She shrugged and grinned at him. "Well, you know. A girl has to tailor her approach to her man."

They laughed together, and snuggled closer in the sun.

* * *

Johnny decided he liked the Barringtons. Of course, the fact that he was mildly buzzed after matching beer for beer with Matt went a long way towards making him mellow towards everybody, but still. They were his kind of people. Which made it all the more disconcerting that they were also Jed's kind of people. Maybe they were more alike than they thought.

The afternoon wore on, and the combination of sun and alcohol made him pleasantly dozy. He didn't really give a thought to his father's return until the car was actually pulling up outside the house. He sat up abruptly.

Beside him, Matt also straightened. "Is that your dad?" he asked warily.

"Yeah." He was feeling a whole lot closer to sober right now. Oh, of course, his father wouldn't start anything with people around - but that didn't mean he wouldn't save it up for later. Quite the opposite, in fact.

He glanced across at Jed and Abbey, still giggling together in the grass. "Hey Jed, dad's here," he said. Just exactly as if this was a casual observation and not an urgent 'get your hands off your girlfriend and look respectable right _now_'.

Jed got the message, all the same. He sat up abruptly, trying with little success to flatten down his ruffled hair. "Stop it," Abbey ordered. She managed to get him looking semi-presentable with a quick but expert hand brushed through his hair and straightening of his collar, while Jed squirmed with embarrassment. Johnny saved that mental image up for later teasing, and got to his feet.

"Afternoon, dad," he greeted, with pasted on false cheer. It was an expression he'd perfected well.

"Jonathan," his father nodded shortly. He came to a halt on the pathway as he registered the presence of strangers in his front yard.

Jed smiled at him with an optimism that was surely woefully misplaced. "Dad, I'd like you to meet Abbey Barrington, and her brother Matthew."

Johnny didn't miss the subtle tightening of his father's jaw, but he'd never failed at playing the coolly polite card when they were in company. "Miss Barrington," he said, inclining his head in a minuscule nod. "My son has told me a great deal about you."

Abbey, bless her, turned on the megawatt charm with no regard for the tension polluting the atmosphere. "Mr. Bartlet! It's a pleasure to finally meet you."

His dad might automatically disapprove of anything and everything associated with his older son's choices in life, but even he couldn't find pretty girls smiling at him actively objectionable. He even unbent enough to accept her offered hand, though it was not John Bartlet's usual policy to shake hands with women.

Matt stepped up to stand beside his sister; without actually doing anything overtly to telegraph it, he exuded warning protective vibes. "Sir," he nodded bluntly. He made little attempt to coat it in more than perfunctory politeness, and Jonathan wanted to snarl at him for not realising that his father might affect not to notice it but he'd _take it out on Jed_. John Bartlet had been a headmaster too long not to recognise a 'Sir' that was delivered with contempt when he heard one.

He wondered what Jed had told Matt and Abbey about their father, if he'd told them anything. Or was the bad air between Jed and his father plainly visible from the outside? Johnny had always lived too close to the centre of it to know.

"You travel with your sister?" his father said, meeting Matt's eyes coolly. "Commendable. It's always good to meet a young man with a sense of responsibility."

It was almost an art form how his father managed to simultaneously radiate his disapproval of Matt _and_ still take a sideways swipe at Jed.

"Well, you can't be too careful these days," Matt smiled insincerely. "There are some unsavoury sorts about."

"Indeed."

Matt definitely knew _something_. Abbey looked more puzzled, and uncomfortable at her brother's barely concealed rudeness. Johnny found it difficult to imagine that his brother would have let her know anything more than was painfully apparent from the strained atmosphere. The thing between Jed and his father just... was. It wasn't something to be spoken about.

And yet, in many ways, Jed sometimes seemed almost masochistically inclined to just try and ignore it. He smiled brightly, hopefully at his father. "Dad, is it okay if Matt and Abbey stay for dinner? I'd really like for you to get a chance to meet them."

Abbey quickly made polite noises of demurral, but John Bartlet was nothing if not a rigid slave to what he saw as 'proper' behaviour. He might be internally furious at Jed for extending the invitation, but he'd die before he was willing to publicly retract it. He inclined his head towards his oldest son.

"Of course."

Johnny knew right then it was going to be the evening from hell.


	14. XIV

** XIV **

Dinner at the Bartlet household was a nervewracking affair. Abbey could feel the waves of disapproval emanating from Jed's father, and couldn't quite understand them. She'd been braced for the man to dislike her, everything Jed had said about him suggested that he would, but this was something else. He was angry at Jed, that much was obvious, but surely not just over inviting strangers to the supper table. It felt like a bigger, deeper anger than that, some great chasm of fundamental disagreement. She wondered if he was still furious about Jed abandoning the priesthood... but that didn't seem right, because Jed had said his father wasn't Catholic himself and didn't really approve of Jed taking on the religion.

There were things going on in this atmosphere that she didn't understand. Matt knew something, she couldn't imagine what, and it'd had his hackles raised from the moment Jed's father had arrived on the scene. She wondered if Jonathan had told him something; she couldn't believe Jed would have told her brother anything he couldn't tell her.

Jonathan was a puzzle as well. From what she'd seen of him he was a typically brash, loud and carefree excuse for a teenager, but for the whole duration of the meal he'd been staring determinedly down at his plate as if his life depended on it. He seemed almost violently tense, as if waiting for the room to explode at any moment. She wondered if it often did. Jed was deeply passionate about many things, but she couldn't imagine him having any kind of screaming row with his father.

Jed himself was unusually solemn. His looks and the little moments when he would not so accidentally brush against her hand were as warm as ever, but his words were guarded, and his playful sense of humour tightly reined. The way he studiously avoided looking his father's way was as obvious as any series of repeated glances.

Abbey did her best to preserve the fragile atmosphere, keeping the conversation bright and light, but she felt more than a little like she was lost in subtext without a map. The worst part was being so uncertain of her ground - she knew there were landmines buried here she didn't want to set off, but while she could guess what subjects some lay under, she was sure there were others littered around she could stumble over by mistake. It left her scrabbling for trite small-talk, and she hated that. She'd always liked that she could talk to Jed about the deeper things.

"So, um... how's your dad's practice doing?" Jed seemed similarly starved for safe topics of conversation. Strip away political views and school and religion and future plans and anything too in-depth about their relationship, and suddenly they were all finding it necessary to perform mental gymnastics to steer the conversation along a safe path.

At times like this, Abbey reflected, it would probably help if she cared about sport.

"Pretty good," she smiled. "Did he tell you about that article he was writing for-"

"Yeah." Jed cut her off a little too quickly, and she guessed it was a warning against name-dropping her father's highly prestigious publication opportunity. It seemed strange - John Bartlet hardly seemed like the kind of man who would be ferociously anti-snobbery. "They printed it?"

"Yeah. And he got a letter from a French surgeon about co-writing another piece."

"That's great," Jed beamed, and she marvelled at his ability to be genuinely pleased for her father in the midst of this strained and awkward conversational black hole. She tried another gambit.

"And he says to tell you he's been brushing up his chess moves. Do you play chess, Mr. Bartlet?"

Out of the corner of her eye, she caught Johnny twitch every so slightly. _Boom!_ Landmine. What had she stepped in here? Jed's father smiled tightly.

"I find I have no taste for the game, Miss Barrington. Rigidly restricted rules and arbitrary goals may help to govern pieces on a playing board, but they do not translate well to the real world."

That sounded dumb to her, for surely strategy and logic were valuable whatever set of rules you learned them under, and besides, who said chess had to prove anything? It was an intellectual exercise in itself. But this was this man's home and he was her boyfriend's father, and she knew all about smiling politely. "Yes, I suppose that's true." She could read Jed's body language well enough to read both his urge to speak up and how he restrained it.

Apparently, though, she'd hit on one of his father's pet issues, and now he was preparing to hold forth on it.

"In this world, people are too ready to hand out crowns for intellectualism." The curl of contempt to his lip startled her - why would a man who was a schoolmaster consider being intellectual a _bad_ thing? "They treat test scores and the name of the institution on a degree as the be all and end all, as if either of those was any substitute for good, hard work."

She could almost see the shadow of a point there, but she didn't like the way he delivered it. Yes, of course it was bad to disregard people who worked hard just because they weren't straight-A students. That didn't mean the people who got those straight As shouldn't be praised for it.

This would normally be a good time to start an argument, but something told her Mr. Bartlet wasn't someone greatly open to disagreement. If he was anybody else she'd dive in there just the same and enjoy the fireworks, but... he was Jed's dad.

"I suppose you're right, sir," she half-agreed politely. "There's more to being a good student than just how smart you are."

"Precisely," he agreed coolly. "Some people think they can coast through life without effort or responsibility on the strength of some SAT scores." This was accompanied by a pointed glance at Jed, but Abbey couldn't guess what this was in reference to, for it was hard to think of a single boy less inclined to cruise through his studies than Jed. He didn't just hit every book on the reading list, he had to be alternately bribed, cajoled and threatened to drag him away from every advanced-level text he could find that was even remotely related to the subject. Jed was probably one of the brightest people she'd ever met, but he threw himself at his classes as if he'd be kicked off the course if he misplaced an apostrophe.

She wondered if it was his father who'd made him that way. Certainly he showed no sign of appreciating any of Jed's many and varied achievements. He treated his oldest son with a cold disdain that was close to incomprehensible to her. She was used to her own father, rigidly stern at times but never less than a pillar of no-nonsense support and gruff affection. This blank and distant disapproval was awful, choking every last flicker of life out of the conversation and the room.

If it was like this all the time, she couldn't imagine how it hadn't yet choked the life out of Jed.

The rest of the meal passed in similarly stilted conversation and flat silences, and she'd never been so grateful to get out of a room.

Jed hovered on the doorstep with her as Matt wandered on a little way ahead, giving them some space. "I'm sorry," he sighed heavily. "He's like that sometimes, it's not-"

Abbey stopped him with a gentle kiss, heartbroken that he thought it was him who needed to apologise. "It's okay," she smiled softly. "I wasn't expecting anybody to throw me a party. I'm in love with you, not your dad."

Jed hunched his shoulders, hands scrunched defensively in his pockets. "Yeah, but he's kind of part of the package," he pointed out sadly.

Abbey smiled, shaking her head at him, and hugged him close to her. "Oh, honey, there's nothing they could add to this package that's bad enough to stop me wanting it," she assured him.

"I wanted him to like you," Jed said miserably. "I'm sure he would, if he would only-"

"Well, he'll have plenty of time to learn to," Abbey said firmly. "He doesn't have to like me by tomorrow, or next week, or next year, 'cause I'm not going anywhere."

"Yeah." Jed grinned back at her now, somewhat sheepish and all the cuter for it. "Yeah, I guess so. It's just-" He smirked. "How can anybody not fall in love with you the instant they meet you?"

"It's a mystery to me," she said wryly, and lightly slapped his shoulder. "Stop it, you, you'll go to a girl's head."

"Or other parts," he leered, mugging furiously. Jed trying to be wicked was so theatrically over the top it was hysterical... and, disturbingly, strangely hot.

"Oh, you were never _really_ going to be a Catholic priest," she teased him.

"Was too. You corrupted me."

Abbey smirked. "Then my work here is done."

"Oh, I think I could stand to be corrupted some more," he said, leaning into her. "-But not on my dad's front porch," he added quickly, remembering himself. They reluctantly pulled apart.

"I'd better go," she admitted with a sigh.

"And I'd better stay," he said, similarly woebegone. She wanted to ask him to come back with her and Matt to the hotel again, but she restrained herself. He would if she asked him, and the last thing she wanted to do was get him into any more trouble with his dad.

"Guess I'll see you tomorrow." They shared another quick kiss; these were chaste kisses, both of them keenly aware of his father's likely opinion of more overt demonstrations, but they still knocked her out more than any clumsy make-out session with any boy she'd dated before.

"Our last day together," Jed said sadly. "I'll miss you so much."

"We'll make it count," Abbey promised to him.

"It doesn't matter what we do, it'll count," Jed said earnestly. "I'm just so glad you could come down here, I was going crazy without you. Tell your dad I'm so grateful to him, if there's anything I can-"

"Jed," she laughed. "He wouldn't take it if you could! He likes you, Jed."

"Yeah. Wish I could say the same about my dad," he said heavily.

After they finally parted, that phrase hung with her. She couldn't help but wonder if it had been an accident of clumsy wording in wishing his dad would like her... or something else it broke her heart to even contemplate.

* * *

"Hey, Matty." His sister smiled tiredly at him, sitting crosslegged in her pyjamas and looking even younger than she usually did. No, Abbey couldn't be dating and on her way to college. She was just a baby!

"Don't call me that, squirt." The automatic protest was as much affectionate as irritated. He flopped back onto the hotel bed next to her, deliberately bouncing the springs.

"Hey, budge up." She shoved him. "You've got your own bed, who said you can crash on mine?"

"It's rule four of the big brother code. What's mine is mine, and what's yours is also mine."

"And you're absolutely welcome to any of my dresses you think you'd look good in. What are the first three rules?"

"The three As. Annoy, annoy, annoy."

She gave him her best cruel smile. "You're a natural."

"Runs in the family."

"Some things don't." Abbey sighed, becoming serious and resting her head on her chin. "I really wanted to-" She broke off. "Jed's dad is not what I was expecting."

"He was pretty much what I was expecting," Matt said, leaning back against the wall and feeling his boisterous mood drain away. Poor Jed.

Abbey sat up and regarded him sharply. "Yeah. Yeah, you were. What the hell is that, Matt? Did Johnny tell you something about him?"

Matt was caught twisting in the wind. Daniel Barrington had brought his children up to be honest whatever the consequences, and lying to family was double the crime... but Jed had specifically asked that Abbey not be told about his father's violence. He didn't want to be pitied, which Matt guessed he could understand, but at the same time he didn't feel right about keeping Abbey in the dark about what kind of man they were dealing with here.

"Dad had a word with me before we came," he hedged carefully. "He... I think Jed said something to him, I don't know. He warned me that things with Jed's dad were gonna be pretty crappy, and I should watch out for the guy because he might be dangerous."

"Dangerous?" She scowled. "He's a bully! Plain and simple."

He had to smile fondly at his sister. "Yeah, and I agree with you, but contrary to what your kindergarten experiences may have taught you, not all bullies can be defeated with a scathing look and an uppercut to the jaw."

"Beg to differ," Abbey said with a feral light in her eye, but she snorted a brief laugh at herself and lay back. "I know, I know. He's Jed's dad and everything..." She sighed. "It's not right. I mean, I swear, he didn't even look at him once except to glare. And to keep cutting him off like that! Like he doesn't even have the right to an opinion."

Abbey was building up to a blaze of righteous rage. Matt was almost surprised she hadn't made the connection between Jed's sorry home life and the mysterious bruises that tended to sprout on him during the holidays, but he supposed it was too horrific a possibility to let herself think it. It made his own eyes burn and his fists itch just to contemplate it.

"He can't stay here," Matt said angrily. He hated feeling so powerless, not even able to just yank Jed aside and say 'Jesus, man, what are you doing? Get yourself out of here!'

"Yeah, but what are we gonna do, kidnap him?" Abbey demanded, a touch bitterly. "They're his family."

"Yeah, but we're-" He viewed the sentence ahead, mentally whacked himself around the head for it, and revised. "We're his friends," he finished somewhat lamely.

Of course, little sister was too sharp to miss that skipped beat. She smirked at him. "Did you just adopt my boyfriend into the family?"

"No!"

"You did. You totally just did."

"I said we're his friends! I don't know how you get from that to-"

"I get from that to that was totally not what you were going to say first of all."

When in doubt, reach for the witty repartee. "Shut up."

She giggled. "Ha! You like my boyfriend. You think he's family!"

"Do not!"

"Do too."

"You are so immature."

"Yeah, well, I've got you as a role model."

He retaliated by tickling her, she hit him with a pillow, and it turned into a typical hair-pulling, name-calling, scuffling sibling fight.

It cheered the two of them both up immensely.


	15. XV

** XV **

"Hey." Jed's smile was a little wan as he greeted her in the Bartlets' front yard; she guessed he and his dad had probably had some huge argument after she and Matt were gone.

"Hey." She sat down next to him, and laid her head against his shoulder. He smiled, and rubbed her hair.

"Listen, I really am sorry about last night," he said again. She sat up, and kissed him briefly.

"We really are gonna have to do something about this apologetic habit of yours," she chided, tapping him sternly on the nose.

He blinked innocently at her. "You don't find it endearing?"

"Not when you only do it when it's not your fault and you never ever do it when it is."

"Hmph." He pretended to be disgruntled.

"Hi, Abbey. Hey, Matt." Jonathan wandered out of the building to join them. Jed remembered they weren't the only people in the universe at that, and gave Matt a nod.

"Hey," her brother shrugged lazily. He paused to scrutinise Jed with an odd intensity. "You okay?"

Jed frowned as he stretched an arm around her shoulders. "Sure. Why wouldn't I be?"

_Because there's no way in hell your dad didn't start shouting the moment we were halfway down the path last night?_ she thought, but didn't say. Matt pasted a smirk over any evidence of concern.

"Well, you know. Last day before Miss Bossy-Pants here gets on a train and leaves you to freedom. You won't know what to do with yourself when she's not around to tell you."

Johnny snorted, but Jed just turned and smiled at her. "She can boss me about long distance."

"You bet." She kissed him on the nose by way of a reward. Matt made a disgusted sound.

"Okay, are you two gonna be like this all day? Because I could always, you know, go hang myself."

Abbey smiled sweetly at him. "Be my guest."

"You want to go walking?" Jed asked her hopefully. Other boys might try to make their last day together some spectacular event with parties or movies or flash restaurants, but Jed just wanted to walk and talk in the sun holding hands. He seemed honestly quite baffled by the idea that it should matter what they did together, as long as they _were_ together.

She had to admit, it was adorable as hell. "Sure."

She accepted the hand he offered to help her up, but was startled as Matt suddenly muscled into their personal space. "What did you do to your arm?" he demanded intensely, grabbing Jed by the elbow.

"Nothing," he said defensively, trying to tug his sleeve down over his hand. Abbey looked between the two of them in confusion.

"Yeah, right. It's always nothing, isn't it? Show me." He used one of those big-brother arm-locks he was always working on her to stop Jed escaping, and yanked back his sleeve. Abbey's breath came out in a started hiss as she saw the ring of bruises that circled his wrist.

Jed finally succeeded in pulling away from her brother, looking as closed off and defensive as he'd ever seen him. "It isn't anything, Matt. Really."

She glimpsed Jonathan hovering in the background, looking pale and almost frightened by the turn things had suddenly taken.

"Sure it is, you want to tell me how you did _that_ by accident?" her brother demanded.

Abbey had already made the connection. You wouldn't get bruising like that unless somebody had _grabbed_ you, really hard, and- Suddenly she felt sick.

"Just leave it, Matt, okay?" Jed demanded, backing away and scowling. He looked angry, but there was a different emotion beneath it, one kept tightly corralled and locked away.

Her brother was relentless, in Jed's face and verbally attacking with the force of a hot temper that was in no way trained on him. "Did your dad do this to you? Did you have a little talk last night? You want to show us any other bruises you've got because you're so... klutzy?"

_Christ._ Oh Christ, oh, Jesus. Bruises. Telltale bruises, after spring break, after Christmas...

He'd explained them away as clumsy falls and boyish stupidities, and she'd believed him - why wouldn't she have believed him? She remembered the vicious pattern of black and blue bruises that had covered the whole of his lower back when he'd returned from home in January.

Slipped on a pile of logs, he'd said... She could still see the sheepish, adorably embarrassed look on his face as he'd acted for all the world as if he'd been clumsy and stupid.

_Oh, Jed._ She wanted to reach for him, pull him into her arms and never let go, but he was still retreating.

"I said leave it, Matt!" he snapped, shoving away from him in a gesture that was instinctive fight-or-flight with no expertise behind it. He'd probably never been in a fight in his life... but, oh, he'd seen violence. Seen it for God only knew how long, found it waiting for him right here in his own home, and taken it in stolid silence. She saw that now, saw through all the things that had always seemed such a mystery of opposites in Josiah Bartlet, finally saw all the way through it to the whole of the man that lived beneath.

And he was beautiful. He thought his bruises made him ugly, something to be pitied, something to be shunned, but in her eyes, he was only beautiful.

She heard a muffled sound from Johnny, choked off too soon to identify the emotion behind it, and the front door slammed loud as he retreated, ran away from this laying open of family secrets long buried. The three of them were left frozen in a tableau, the weight of the truth lying heavy between them.

She stepped towards him. "Jed-"

He backed away from her extended hand, eyes wounded and full of angry misery. "Abbey, just- Just forget it, okay? Just leave it alone. It isn't- It doesn't- Just forget it."

He was backing away from her, and then suddenly he turned away, starting to jog away and then speeding up into a run. Matt moved as if to go after him, and she stopped him with an arm across the belly.

"Let him go, Matt."

Matt turned to her, hot temper fading now into an uneasy blend of pity, worry and guilt. "Abbey, I-"

"Yeah, I know," she cut him off softly. "I know."

He rested his arm around her shoulders, a rare and unanticipated gesture. "He'll be okay," he said quietly. "He's tough. You know he's got to be. He'll be okay."

"I know he will," Abbey agreed, solemnly but forcefully. She looked up at her brother. "But we have to let him have a moment. It's-" She didn't have any words to sum up the whole sorry, solid mess of it. "Let him have his moment."

* * *

He still recognised the pattern of her tread, even out here in the grass. He didn't look up from where he sat, arms tightly folded around his knees and head lowered, closed in on himself like a turtle retreating into its shell. He hadn't been crying, although his eyes burned with the wretched frustration of being laid open like this.

He hadn't wanted her to know. He'd just wanted one single, precious corner of his life that was free from the taint of this, where he could just be himself, untouched by his father's shadow

Abbey sat beside him, silent. She made no move to touch him or try to bring him out of himself, only waited for him to come to her in his own time.

Jed let out a slow, heavy breath, and finally raised his head. "Abbey, I-"

She laid a finger against his lips, and gave him a sorrowful smile. "You don't have to say anything," she promised in a whisper. "Don't say anything."

She leaned forward, and kissed him, a ghost of a touch that made him shiver and close his eyes. When he opened them, she was still knelt in front of him, looking at him with a gentle half smile. He studied her eyes, but he could see no pity there. She wasn't repulsed, or steeped in unwanted condolences, or quietly distressed by his weaknesses. All he could see in her eyes was the exact same thing he'd always seen, the exact same love that had been there for him before his secret shame was known.

He smiled sadly then, a fragile, tentative expression that could have been shattered with as little as a word, a look or a gesture.

Abbey smiled back, and laid her head against his shoulder. "I love you," she said, and that was all.

That was everything.

* * *

They were silent for a long time, lying side by side in the grass looking up at the sky. Finally Abbey struggled to sit upright, and looked down at him.

"Show me," she said softly, a world away from the angry way her brother had made the same demand. "Take your shirt off, and let me see."

Jed sat up too, and his face started to close off again, the quiet trust she'd earned from him beginning to peel away. "Abbey-" he said warningly.

"I love you," she said simply. "Let me see."

He hesitated, but after a moment quietly popped out each of the buttons one by one, and let the shirt fall from his shoulders.

The marks on his wrist were not the only ones. His stomach was bruised from what had surely been a violent blow to it, and his side above his hip as if he'd been knocked into something. There were the marks of faint and faded scars, some which her eyes and fingers had traced before, others she had never stopped to notice.

Abbey saw all of this, and none of it. The doctor in her ached for his injuries, wanted to take him in her arms and heal him, fix him, but to the woman in her, he was more than a catalogue of wounds. He was Jed, and she loved him.

He watched her as she looked at him, laid bare in more ways than one, and a little afraid. "What do you see?" he finally blurted, when she was silent for too long.

"You," she said simply.

She smiled, and slowly, wonderingly, he began to smile back.

"You're beautiful," she told him, and wrapped her arms around him, pulling him close.


	16. XVI

** XVI **

They stayed out in the fields for a long time. For a lot of it they were silent, but the stretches between speech were no less meaningful that the words.

"I wish I didn't have to leave you here," Abbey said, and Jed gave her a soft smile.

"I'll survive," he assured her. "I always have."

"You know that doesn't make it okay."

She looked him in the eye, and he looked down, watching his own fingers stirring the grass. She touched his arm.

"Jed..." She took a long breath. "You don't have to tell me anything," she promised. "You will never have to tell me anything. But whatever you tell me, it could never make me pity you... it could never make you one tiny fraction smaller in my eyes. I love you. I think you're amazing. And nothing- nothing you could ever tell me, nothing you could ever show me about yourself would make me feel that any less."

He smiled at her, eyes far older than his years looking out of a face that was still more than half boy. "Thank you," he said simply, and she knew that it must mean a lot to him. He wasn't ready to talk about whatever had passed between him and his father... perhaps he never would be. If he ever wanted to talk, she would be there for him. If he never did, she would respect his silence. Whether he told her anything or not, she would love and support him as he needed.

He circled his arm around her, and she leaned against him. He hadn't bothered to slip his shirt back on, and his bare skin was smooth and warm against her. One day, she promised herself, she would know every inch of it as well as and better than she knew her own. She rubbed his chest, and he made a rumbling chuckle deep within it that was almost a purr.

"You know I'm going home this afternoon," she reminded him, as if either of them could have forgotten.

"Yeah," he sighed regretfully. It was almost a yawn; the heat of the sun made things drowsy and dreamlike.

"Wanna leave it all behind and run away with me?"

He smiled at her. "Yeah. But I'm not gonna."

"No." She laid her head back against his chest, and he stroked her hair lazily.

"I like it out here in the fields," she observed after a while. "It's so peaceful."

"Yeah," Jed agreed warmly. "I was thinking... one day, I'd love to have a farm out here. A proper farm, with animals and everything - but not a working farm. Just a place where you can, you know, walk through the fields or lean over the fence and watch the sunset."

"You'd go stir-crazy living on a farm," she reminded him. "You need people."

He shrugged easily. "Well, it can be our holiday home. When you're a big-shot doctor, supporting us both."

She snickered and yawned. "Something like that."

After a few moments of lazing, Jed sat up, dislodging her. "Quit fidgeting," she objected drowsily. "You make a lousy pillow."

He just smiled, and looked at her in a way that made her feel self-consciously warm and flustered. She flicked back the ends of her hair. "What?" she asked, uncharacteristically shyly.

"You look at home out here," he told her. "Out in the fields, where everything's wild and beautiful."

She surprised herself by blushing slightly. There was an unusual seriousness to him here and now, and she was powerless against it. The look in his eyes cut through playful flirting to the deeper emotion beneath, and it left her breathless.

"I love you," he told her. "I think you're the most wonderful thing in the world. And you make me... When I'm with you, I feel like I'm _me_. All the way, as much as I can possibly be. You take me outside of myself and show me all the things that I could be that I never knew how to before. You make me into... something greater."

Abbey touched his lips to quiet him. "You would have been great no matter what, Josiah Bartlet," she told him quietly.

"Maybe," he said. "But I would never have been happy."

She touched his lips again, and kissed them, chasing away the solemn remnants of a reality that might have been.

"You'll never be alone again," she promised. "I'll always be with you. No matter what happens, no matter where we go and how long we're apart. I'll be with you."

"You already are," he told her, taking both her hands. "You're part of me now... the part that was missing."

"Your other half?" She smirked slightly.

"My other whole," he corrected.

"You always know what to say," Abbey smiled at him. "Well, you know. Apart from when you say something really stupid. But... most times."

She hugged him. "I hope so," he murmured against her shoulder.

Jed hesitated when they pulled apart, and scuffled his toe in the grass.

"I-" He broke off and smiled shyly. "I'm gonna do this all wrong, okay? But bear with me."

"I'll try to constrain myself," she said dryly.

"I... I love you. A lot. A... a whole lot."

Abbey blinked at him, and then just had to giggle. "Tell me, do you have written proof of those SAT scores?"

He narrowed his eyes at her, pouting. "Can you shut up at let me make the big romantic speech, please?"

She raised a hand to her forehead and pretended to go weak at the knees. "My, you're sweeping me off my feet."

"Shh." But he chuckled. "Okay. Okay. Look serious, please." She nodded briskly and set her jaw, holding in more laughter. "As we have previously established, I am completely, hopelessly, ridiculously crazily in love with you. To the point of uncharacteristic ineloquence."

"But at no loss to your long-windedness," she noted.

"Do you mind? Yes. I love you. And you love me."

"And we've got a love thing."

He gazed at her mock-sternly from underneath his eyebrows. "Any more of these interruptions, young lady, and I'm going to make you stand in the corner."

"Sorry." She once again schooled her expression into something approaching serious.

"Anyway, what I wanted to say was... I can't imagine ever being without you, and- I don't know what I would do if you ever- Oh, dammit." He threw up his hands, and grinned at her, eyes twinkling. "Marry me?" he said optimistically.

She burst out laughing and threw herself into his arms, knocking him backwards.

"Hey, hey, hey!" he objected, laughing. "I'm not just a piece of meat, you know! Answer the question, lady."

She pulled away from him and brushed back her hair, composing her face. "Maybe," she said, with a grin.

He arched his eyebrows at her. "Did you just say... maybe?"

She smirked. "Gonna make you sweat it a little first."

"Is that right?" he demanded, advancing on her and lightly gripping her by the wrists. She backed up.

"That's a fact," she agreed.

"Then I guess I'll have to be... more persuasive." He waggled his eyebrows and leaned in to kiss her. She let his lips brush hers and then drew back teasingly. He leaned further, and the two of them went down in a jumble of limbs. Jed grabbed for her.

"Oh, no fair tickling, no fair tickling!" she yelped, trying to roll out of his reach.

"All's fair in love, war and marriage proposals," he told her, grinning wildly, his hair sticking up in all directions. "Answer the question, lady, or there's more where that came from."

"I'm not telling you anything now- Oh, no, Jed, stop it, hey- stop it!"

"Surrender!" he demanded, gleefully flushed and out of breath as she struggled to stop him tickling her.

"If you honestly think- I'm gonna- marry you if you- keep-" Her breath deserted her, and she collapsed, giggling uncontrollably, into his arms.

They lay together in the long grass, limbs and laughter mingling, and the sound of bright young voices rising up into the summer sky. In the grand scheme of things, it was really only a few short moments before they had to part.

But sometimes, a couple of moments could last forever.

** THE END **


End file.
